According to the Centers for Disease Control, 704 cases of measles—divided between 22 states—have been confirmed in the United States since the first of the year. Despite the fact that CDC estimates that in 1962, the year before the licensing of the first (ineffective) measles vaccine, there were three to four million cases of measles in the country and no panic (only about ten percent of cases were even reported), this is being billed as an “emergency” requiring immediate action by various state and local government officials all over the country—most notably perhaps in my own state, New York, where Republican Rockland County Executive Ed Day has twice declared a…