Measles was declared eliminated in the United States in the year 2000 due to an effective vaccine. But a quarter century later the disease is still here and causing sickness and hospitalizations because people aren’t giving their kids the shot and we are heading backwards as vaccine foe Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was just sworn in as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The vaccine still works as well as ever. It is safe and effective and does not cause autism. But dangerous jerks like Bobby Kennedy have made lucrative businesses of sowing doubt. As they got rich, the suckers who believed them got sick. Now, an outbreak has been growing in Texas, mostly among unvaccinated children, and recently spread to multiple other states, including New York.
Some 58 cases have been confirmed, and 13 people were hospitalized as of the start of this week. We can’t say we’re too confident in the rapid-response federal public health response, given that the person newly confirmed to run it, Kennedy, is one of the people most responsible for this shift in public perception.
RFK certainly has relevant experience here, not in preventing the spread of measles, but in causing it. The Kennedy scion infamously visited Samoa in 2019 as experts worried about the nation’s vaccination rates and urged the island’s government to view the lagging rates as a “natural experiment” of health without vaccines. The result was a measles outbreak that infected thousands and killed 83, mainly children. Coming into leadership of the HHS amid this crisis, RFK has made his priorities known: he is ordering reexamination of the childhood vaccine schedule as one of his first acts.
At the exact same time, Stephen Miller, the openly xenophobic architect of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda, is reportedly considering seizing on measles to implement a Title 42-like policy, tarring would-be immigrants as disease vectors in order to bar them from entering the country. In fact, Miller had considered using measles as a lever to restrict humanitarian migration way back in Trump’s first term, before COVID-19 handed him the perfect excuse.
Throughout the use of the expulsion policy, public health experts maintained that it did nothing to actually control the spread of COVID, but Trump and Miller never really cared if it did, and the dichotomy would be even starker for measles. At least with COVID, Trump’s administration strove to coordinate the creation of a vaccine. Now, Trump has made one of the people most responsible for steering people away from the single most effective therapeutics in the history of humanity the head of the nation’s public health system.
This puts the lie to the idea that the administration actually cares about the spread of measles in the country as opposed to reaching for any conceivable cudgel to enact its restrictionist designs and leave vulnerable people this country is supposed to be a beacon for out to the wolves.
The White House appears happy to let the disease run rampant in the U.S., so long as it’s not being brought by immigrants. This should be a strong enough argument in the courts, where the evidence will show conclusively that the measles threat is coming solidly from within.
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