I'm not a trump fan, but the antivax train has nothing to do with him. (Evidence: Canada is doing even worse then us when it comes to measles). If we want to fix this problem (we do), the first step is to recognize the actual problem, not to play the blame game on whichever politician you currently don't like!
The reason there are measles cases is because a decent percentage of people aren't getting vaccinated anymore. If all of the cases were 2 year olds or younger (when RFK was put in charge) then possibly. But not only are they older (https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html), this is also happening in Canada. I don't see how it could possibly be RFK's fault.
True, but RFK (and other politicians and celebrities) have been active in pushing some form of anti-vax ideology for a decade plus, in some cases back to the 1970s.
It's been a growing movement, not something that kicked off when RFK assumed the HHS role.
I agree. But to be clear the original comment / context is about MAGA / Trump. I think responding 'No, you're wrong! RFK is the reason' to a thread about Trump and then retreating to RFK's activities over the last 20 years is arguing in bad faith.
The entire reason I made my original comment is because it's important to recognize that this is not a Trump thing, and getting rid of Trump / MAGA will not suddenly convince people that vaccines are good.
It's not _solely_ a Trump thing, but he gave RFK an enormous platform and has himself been espousing demonstrably untrue things about vaccines and vaccination schedules. This very week, in fact. [1]
If you don't see this as an enormous amplification, I don't think you're operating in good faith.
Pre-Trump, anti-vaxxers were notorious left-wing granola types. Lots of anti-vaxxers were white liberals living in Marin and NorCal and sending their children to private schools like Waldorf.
Only after Trump did people start lumping them in with right wing.
While It’s fair to point out that RFK is hopping on a train that’s already got momentum, your first comment reads as if it’s not caused by falling vaccination rates (your second comment clarified further).
Also why not blame politicians doing the wrong thing?
Perhaps I should've been clearer. And yes they aren't helping.
And yes, we should blame them for the things they do. T
But the comment I was responding to was acting as if MAGA was the reason for measles outbreaks, which is false. I'm an incredibly strong believer in the truth. An example of why I think this is an important separation: imagine you tried to fix the measles outbreak and miraculously got every single American to hate Trump and got Trump out of office. The problem would still not be fixed! People would still be dying of measles! The effort would have been almost completely wasted!
A major campaign by RFK's replacement could absolutely make a significant difference stopping the spread of measles. That's the whole point of the (proven extremely effective!) vaccine.
Do you believe this? I think it might help a little, but so we're on the same page RFK has only been in charge for 2 years. Why wasn't the previous secretary of health doing this? The measles outbreaks may be relatively new but we've had the vaccination data to see it coming for over a decade.
My personal belief is that there a lot of people who believe stupid things out there (and it's all only amplified by the news and social media), and for anti vaxxers especially I don't think an authority figure saying 'You have to get the measles vaccine!' is going to help much, unfortunate as it is. :(
Inaction (and really, let's be clear - making it worse) is RFK's choice.
We managed to cut the smoking rate pretty dramatically, including in about half over the last decade. Public policy is not ineffective, we just need competent people to wield it.
I think we live in a different age man. Media nowadays is completely different. Example: I have literally never had cable tv in my house. I've probably watched cable TV around 10 times total, all in a hotel room growing up. My media is all online, uncontrolled and (relatively) decentralized. Contrast that with 60 years ago and hopefully you see the difference.
Also smoking smells and has other negative externalities, which doesn't hurt.
I don't think it would be logistically that hard to criminalize the parents or take away their kids in those cases. It would have a lot of other downsides but it would probably reduce the rate pretty directly.
Ok if you want to do this then sure there is an easy solution. I think there are other problems with this though (for example no way this is flying even with the majority of people who are not anti-vax).
I'll bet it would be enough just to make sure that the vaccine waiver signature box is positioned directly below some glossy full color pictures of emaciated, rash covered dead children.
Unlike a lot of pathogenic diseases, measles requires an extraordinarily high amount of herd immunity (upwards of 95%), so this isn't a particularly telling data point on its own.
RFK Jr has been pushing anti-vaccine bullshit for decades. He was already taking defensive stances on his activism (Oh, I'm not anti-vaccine, I'm just providing nonsense arguments and clout for anti-vaccine stances) back in 2015.
Kennedy was already pushing bullshit during the UK Measles vaccine fraud/scare, back in 2005. He was doing this along with a few other celebrities.
I've responded to a few people on this but the comment I was responding to was literally about the last 6 years! The context of this entire thread is about MAGA / Trump! I agree that RFK is hurting and has been for a long time, but that is not what this argument is about!
Most of his criticisms have been about the timing of certain vaccines administrations.
He's not anti vax.
If nobody can challenge science, then it's not science.
Vaccines continues to help us, but that doesn't mean they are perfect and don't cause side effects on certain individuals. Hopefuly the future brings us highly personalized medicine instead of a 1 size fits all.
I mean would you let your non coding coke head brainwormed manager challenge your coding choices? He is not a doctor or scientist, why would we listen to him. And any experts relying on using are horse dewormer grifters or worse.
Claiming RFK is not anti-vax, is like claiming Dario is not anti-open-weights.
(Well, it's way worse that that, but I didn't want to invoke Godwin's law.)
He is not "challenging science" with measured arguments and carefully controlled peer-reviewed research to back his claims. He's deliberately trying to silence science because of a completely unsupported brain fart.
And no, it's not about "timing". It's about spreading baseless FUD to discourage any form of vaccination, because he believes (with no actual evidence, and despite vast amounts of research to the contrary) that vaccination causes autism.
He knows he can't push his base too hard on certain things. He probably knows this about vaccines, he lauds Operation Warp Speed but as a win of his not a vaccine that could have saved millions more with his cooperation. He chooses his power over what's best for all of us. He's the leader of the antivax train by choice.
"The order recommends that all shots be given at separate medical visits, a frequent point Trump has made despite the safety, ease and lower costs of giving vaccines together."
'“Together, there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal,” Trump said of the MMR vaccine at the signing of the order on Monday.'
'Asked if he had evidence that the combined MMR vaccine was “lethal”, Trump said: “No. What I’ve heard is that there are some people who say it is that way.”'
Antivax fundamentally has its contemporary roots in Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent anti-MMR campaign.
So directing by executive order and by his own admission without evidence that the MMR vaccine be split up into separate shots is, very clearly, an antivax action. This is the first victory that Wakefield (a man who had a patent on a single measles vaccine!) wanted, and RFK Jr was pursuing.
But this is Trump saying this and signing it. So as of yesterday, it now has everything to do with Trump, sorry. He has handed the anti-MMR movement its ultimate victory and in so doing validated the entire antivax worldview.
See my other responses. Obviously this is bad. But the current measles outbreak is a symptom of a problem that's been happening over the last 1 or 2 decades. It literally CANNOT be caused by this, neither in the US or Canada.
It's still not too late for anyone who is unvaccinated to get the vaccine! Hopefully the next administration undoes this change, but the really important part is managing to shrink the anti-vax movement (which, if you look at the data in my other comments, you can see has been a problem since before Trump).
FWIW I think Trump #1 (45) wasn't an anti-vax presidency; it might have been suspicious of healthcare professionals (for the good reason that so many people know opioid epidemic victims) and he was always a bit equivocal around hydroxychloroquine and bleach and "powerful light inside the body" but Trump didn't start to lean antivax until not long after Biden took over.
(And let's be clear: Operation Warp Speed was an enormous success even if Trump is an ignoramus)
Some of that might have been expediency — Biden was catching shit from the antivax and healthcare-skeptical movement and moving in on that would be easy — but Trump has always been vulnerable to being influenced by people and RFK Jr appears to be generally so much more persuasive than bears thinking about, so he was a factor later on.
Trump #2 (47) is fully an anti-vax presidency; even Hegseth backed away from flu vaccine mandates, only to have an outbreak in an Army (IIRC?) facility.
They have 10% our population and had twice the cases last year (admittedly, we're starting to catch up). But the truth is that there are huge lag times when it comes to measles / antivax. This is a symptom of a problem that started 10-20 years ago.
RFK and his anti-vax ideas are popular only within a small fringe of the American population. Enough to drop herd immunity to the point where we now have to worry about measles again, but it's far from the majority.
See my other responses. Do you really think RFK could possibly have had an effect on vaccinations over the last 2 decades in the US OR Canada?
Since you seem very emotionally opposed to Trump and his administration: I also don't like Trump or RFK! However, to solve a problem, you have to find the root cause of the problem, and pointing at the most recent politician you hate will never help anyone.
It has a lot to do with him. He doesn't actually have an opinion on any policy issue. For various political reasons, Trump decided to let RFK dictate public health policy according to his extremely delusional ideas. Yes, there was an antivax movement in this country for many years, just as there has been misogyny, racism, and transphobia. Trump has normalized and supercharged all of these moronic and dangerous ideas.
I have not been following measles in Canada, so I can't address that.
See my other comments; it is not possible for RFK to have had any effect on this outbreak. If everyone getting measles was 2 or under, it could be possible; they aren't.
The reason I bring up Canada is as counterevidence; if it was Trump or RFK'S fault, Canada should be doing just fine. They had twice the cases last year in 1/10 the population. The truth is this is a problem with people believing stupid things, and it's going to take a lot more than Trump going out of office to fix.
>> Canada is doing even worse then us when it comes to measles
Not in Canada but unfortunately US nonsense spreads globally pretty quickly these days. The amount of Trump support in the UK is both bizarre and surprising. When someone with the worlds largest megaphone lies about vaccines, unfortunately people everywhere listen.
Trump is trying to hang Fauci. That goes in the completely opposite direction of promoting the trust of medical institutions in general society, and it's trust that will get people back to vaccinating themselves and their children.
Right, because tapping one of the world's biggest vaccine truthers to run the Department of HHS and then proceed to link autism with vaccines and change the recommended MMR vaccine scheduling for children has absolutely no impact on anyone.
He is amplifying the issue, but you're right, Trump is a symptom of the underlying problem. The problem is that internet gave these idiots a platform to mislead people.
Back in the early 90s this wasn't much of a problem. Childhood vaccine requirements weren't some hot-button topic then. Most people would just get them when faced with the requirement. Most opposition was isolated to people who were otherwise contrarians already.
The difference now is that the internet is full of these isolated contrarians who are now influencing gullible people who don't know who to trust.
Neither phones, nor email, not even usenet had this impact. Social media did.
The problem is not with the technology but those that control it. (Some would probably say, the fact that any one actor controls it in the first place.)
Our only means of communication in modern society are a few advertising platforms in hands of even fewer owners, and the engineers hired to run it are busy engagementmaxxing.
I'm blaming the current social media landscape, which amplifies ideas based on the engagement they create, which has an unintended consequence of amplifying exciting controversial falsehoods over long-held boring truths. We have given the largest megaphones to the biggest village idiots.
Completely agree! I will add though: this is a symptom of a problem that started 10-20 years ago. There's a lot of lag time between parents not giving their babies vaccines and outbreaks actually happening. You can see ages here.(https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html) 5 and under are only 20% of cases.
More like 25+ years ago. In the early 2000s you saw a lot of celebrities pushing vaccine fear because they read some book version of "doctors don't want you to know this one wierd fact" that made the best-seller list or another. I remember people arguing about it in college classes, and I graduated in 2003.
He was literally spreading FUD about vaccines today. And the measles stuff has got so bad RFK had to mildy backtrack on his previous antivax statements in recent interviews.
From today:
Both Trump and Kennedy made repeated mentions of autism throughout the order signing, emphasizing a scientifically unproven link between vaccines and the condition. Dozens of studies show no link between the two.
“Today we’re proud to officially announce the United States of America’s gold standard childhood vaccination recommendations. That has to do with many subjects including autism in particular,” Trump said at the beginning of the order signing.
“I’ve seen proof of it, where they have a vaccination where it looks like the size of a bottle of soda, poured into a little child’s body and bad things happen in too many cases,” Trump later said on breaking up each shot into an individual medical visit, before adding: “This is an explosion, it’s an epidemic,” in an apparent reference to autism.
"has nothing to do with it" is not the same as "is not the cause of". Trump and antivax definitely are related as both are symptoms of the same public strategy that spreads misinformation, polarizes discourse and weaponizes stupidity.
>I'm not a trump fan, but the antivax train has nothing to do with him.
Well not nothing. But it predates him and he adopted the movement early in his political career. When I was in high school (2004-8) antivax sentiment was generally associated with liberal Democrats in places like Marin County. This was a favorite retort of conservatives when confronted with their own backwardness on scientific understanding of evolution and climate change. In 2015 Trump began courting the anti-vaccine crowd and the political valence of that flavor of woo-woo nonsense flipped seemingly overnight. It was surreal to see it happen in real time. By 2020 he had lost control of the monster he helped create and the crowd booed him when he said they should get the Covid vaccine.
