(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Despite RFK's happy talk measles isn't going away: It has now spread to Michigan & Pennsylvania [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-18
On March 10, 2020, Trump addressed the news that COVID-19, a fatal communicable disease, had come to America. He dismissed it as no biggie. He said :
"We're prepared, and we're doing a great job with it [COVID-19]. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away."
It was one of at least 38 times between February and October 2020 that America’s dumest President said COVID-19 would soon be over. He was wrong all 38 times. To date, the CDC reports 1,226,565 COVID-19 deaths in the US.
During a televised cabinet meeting on April 10, 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., HHS Secretary, took this Trumpian approach to infectious diseases. He reassured Americans that measles cases were plateauing nationally. Taken at face value, this was good news, as the number of measles cases reported at the time had already doubled 2024's full-year total. But RFK's reassurance has no more value, face or otherwise, than his boss's equally unmoored claim in 2020.
An AP piece on Friday morning showed that RFK's happy talk was 'premature' (which is a neutral way of saying his words are the unscientific product of the incurious mind of an aggressive moron with a poor grasp of his own ignorance). The news agency reported this:
The measles math is simple. If you extrapolate the YTD data to all of 2025, the measles rate will be c.7.5 times what it was in 2024. Assuming only linear growth, and if HHS does not take practical steps, the measles rate by the end of 2026 will be 56 times that of 2024. If the increase is exponential, then it will be many times that.
(Note: the numbers are speculative. God only knows what will happen to the vaccination rate — or what individual states about it. Regardless, considering the sadism and science-denial of the Trump administration, the measles number will go up up a rate between ‘fast’ and ‘faster.’)
It is said that intelligence is knowing what you don't know. Based on that, intelligent people without medical training understand that they cannot have an informed opinion on medical matters (regardless of how many symptom searches they do on WebMD). Instead, they will listen to the medical consensus.
But that is not how MAGA works. The theory in that sewer is that people should do their "own research." Really? How many of us are trained in doing medical research? But I'll play along. Here's my research. Before vaccines, people died from diseases that people now vaccinated do not die from. That's it. Research done.
In the case of measles, there are people old enough to remember childhood before the measles vaccine. Back then, the disease was a right of passage — a box to check on the journey from birth to adulthood. In their rose-tinted memories, that was an exciting time of no seat belts, doctors smoking, and thinking that athletes drinking water during football practice on hot days were effeminate.
Luckily, we have moved on — except for the toxically nostalgic. Those benighted magical thinkers think there is something noble in kids getting sick and toughing it out. We should ask sick kids how they feel about that.
To show that I'm not as mindless in my pro-vax stance as the anti-vaxxers are in theirs, I'll grant you that the measles death rate was low. Before the introduction of the measles vaccine in 1963, the US saw an estimated 3-4 million cases annually, resulting in about 500 deaths. However, as a parent, I prefer a zero death rate. In addition, death was not the only poor outcome. In the pre-vaccine era, measles caused 48,000 hospitalizations and 1,000 cases of encephalitis each year.
Sadly, the 'just let them get it' justification for leaving children exposed to potentially fatal pathogens is not the right wing's only moral failing. They place stock in “parents rights". Earlier this April, Rep. MT Greene, a member of MAGA's intelligentsia, denied she was an anti-vax conspiracist (note: she famously did not get the COVID vaccine). Instead, she declared :
"No, I'm for choice. I'm for parents and people choosing."
Nice try, Marge. I also believe that parents have wide latitude in choosing for their children—as long as that choice does not harm other parents' children, or their own. Suppose you choose not to vaccinate your kid against communicable diseases. In that case, you are also making medical decisions for other kids — especially those who are too young or whose immune systems are too compromised by chemotherapy, etc., to get vaccinated.
But that argument will not resonate with the conservative 'me-firsters.' Consider this MAGA syllogism. Caring for others requires empathy. Conservatives do not have empathy. Ergo, conservatives do not care about other people.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/18/2317280/-Despite-RFK-s-happy-talk-measles-isn-t-going-away-It-has-now-spread-to-Michigan-Pennsylvania?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
