Column: Measles is again on the march across the world, thanks to anti-vaxxers such as RFK Jr.
Forecasting the future is difficult. But here’s an easy prediction: The anti-vaccination movement in the U.S. and globally is going to result in the deaths of more children.
This grim portent comes to us courtesy of UNICEF, which is reporting that 30,601 confirmed cases of measles have been reported in Europe and Central Asia this year through Dec.5.
That’s up from 909 cases in those regions in 2022, or an increase of 3,266%.
"There is no clearer sign of a breakdown in immunization coverage than an increase in cases of measles".
— Regina De Dominicis, UNICEF
UNICEF expects the final annual tally to be considerably higher, because the measles rate nearly doubled in October and November, marking a longer-term surge.
“There is no clearer sign of a breakdown in immunization coverage than an increase in cases of measles,” says Regina De Dominicis, UNICEF’s regional director for Europe and Central Asia.
In the United States, measles has remained more or less under control since the 2019 spike to 1,274 cases: 41 cases reported so far this year, down from 121 in 2022.
The 2019 surge was attributed to pockets of unvaccinated people spreading the virus. A spike also appeared in 2014, when more than half the 667 cases were attributed to unvaccinated Amish communities in Ohio.
That epidemiological pattern is what should give you qualms about what lies ahead for the U.S. That’s because the anti-vaccine movement is in full cry across the country, fueled by right-wing ideology and the presidential campaign, such as it is, of prominent anti-vaccine agitator Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
vax This 2014 map showed the surging incidence across the world of measles (red), whooping cough (green), mumps (brown), rubella (blue), polio (orange) and “other” (yellow). In the developed world, the cause was anti-vaccine sentiment; in the Third World, it was the unavailability of vaccines.
(Council on Foreign Relations)
One factor spurring the spread of anti-vaccine propaganda is the politicization of the COVID-19 vaccines. One leading public health advocate has called that phenomenon an “accelerant” for the anti-vaccine movement, which likens it to a can of gasoline in the hands of an arsonist.
For anti-vaxxers, it has been only a short step from opposition to COVID vaccine mandates to opposition to all childhood immunization mandates. This has often borne the banner of “health freedom,” the idea being that individuals should have the untrammeled right to decide for themselves what to put or not put in their bodies.
That may be marginally defensible when it concerns individuals’ decisions to eat or drink themselves to death, but obviously vaccination is in a different category: A vaccine defends not only patients themselves, but everyone around them — fellow pupils, teachers, family members, strangers with whom they come into contact.
Vaccination works best when it reaches coverage of about 95% of a population, producing what is sometimes described as “herd immunity,” in which a disease is so well suppressed that even the few unvaccinated members are protected.
It doesn’t take a very large decline in vaccine coverage to spur a surge in disease incidence. Consider the record in Britain. Through 1997, about 91% of British schoolchildren had received the measles/mumps/rubella (MMR) vaccine.
In 1998, the Lancet, a then-respected British medical journal, published a notorious article claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and by 2004 the vaccine uptake had fallen to 80%. Measles cases soon surged from an average of about 100 a year through 2005 to 1,280 in 2008 and 1,920 in 2012. By then the vaccination rate had begun to recover, but as of last year it was still below 90%.
That article, by the way, was fully retracted by the Lancet in 2010 and its principal author, Andrew Wakefield, stripped of his medical license. He has since surfaced in the U.S. as a star of the domestic anti-vaccine movement, rubbing shoulders with Kennedy and his gang.
Kennedy’s entry into the political fray poses a particular peril to public health because political reporters, who may be tasked with interviewing him on policy, may be ill-equipped to challenge the fire hose of misinformation and disinformation he dispenses with cocksure certainty.
When a reporter gets it right, compliments are warranted, so let’s examine an interview that CNN’s Kasie Hunt conducted with Kennedy on Dec. 15. Hunt came armed. When she quoted Kennedy as saying “there is no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective,” he responded, “I never said that.”
Hunt cut Kennedy off on the spot, and ran a clip from an interview in which he said, yep: “There is no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.”
Kennedy mumbled and bumbled for a moment or two, then confessed to a “bad choice of words” and eventually retreated to his oft-repeated assertion that none of the vaccines currently recommended for children “have ever been tested in a pre-licensing safety study.”
Unfortunately, at that point, Kennedy had Hunt at a disadvantage. His assertion was carefully phrased to sound as though the Food and Drug Administration waved through all the childhood vaccines without a second thought. In other statements, Kennedy has made clear that he means that the vaccines have not been subjected to placebo-controlled randomized, double-blinded trials. This is the core of Kennedy’s claim that he’s not “anti-vaccine,” but merely an advocate for “vaccine safety.”
As I’ve written before, this is misleading to the point of being a flagrant lie.
The truth is that the FDA doesn’t allow vaccines on the market unless they’ve been safety-tested. When a vaccine is introduced as a treatment for a disease for which no safe and effective vaccine exists, it’s subjected to one of those randomized, placebo-controlled trials.
Once it’s approved, however, that standard for later generations of the same vaccine is different. As explained by vaccine specialist Paul Offit of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, subjecting those vaccines to placebo-controlled testing, say by injecting them with water or a saline solution instead of the vaccine, would be unethical, because it would require depriving half of the subjects of a known treatment.
The vaccines currently recommended for children are later-generation versions of shots that were placebo-tested. So are the COVID-19 vaccine boosters on the market today.
Offit points to what may be the most famous randomized trial in history, the 1954 test of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine, in which about 200,000 first- and second-graders got the vaccine and 200,000 got salt water. Offit tells us that Salk didn’t want to structure the trial that way because polio was paralyzing 50,000 American kids a year and killing 1,500, and he felt it was wrong to deprive 200,000 of protection.
In the event, 16 of the child subjects died of polio during the study, all in the placebo group, and 36 were paralyzed, 34 of them in the placebo group. They gave their lives and health for nothing. Even today, when a clinical trial establishes that a treatment is safe and effective, it’s often halted early, so the placebo patients can get the treatment without waiting.
Hunt let this claim by Kennedy slide, perhaps because she couldn’t be prepared in advance for all the lies he was ready to spin out. But the claim was part of his known arsenal, so perhaps she should have been ready.
“With RFK Jr. running for President,” says veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski, “being ready with clips to bring home the evidence are not enough.” Reporters on the Kennedy beat must develop “a deep knowledge of the antivaccine claims that he’s been making since at least 2005 and then using that knowledge every time he tries to deny being antivaccine.” By his recknoning, “Kasie Hunt did way better than average with RFK Jr., but journalists need to do better still.”
Fighting back against the anti-vaccine propaganda spewed out by Kennedy and his cohort has never been as desperately crucial as it is today.
Thanks to the sustained assault on vaccination and science waged by right-wingers devoted to burnishing their own partisan bona fides rather than working in the public interest, vaccine coverage of kindergarten children has been declining since 2019 and remains well below the 95% target, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The share of children with a non-medical exemption from vaccination, such as a parent’s purported religious or moral objections, reached 3% in the 2022-23 school year, “the highest exemption rate ever reported in the United States,” the CDC reports.
In Florida, that hotbed of anti-science folderol purveyed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and his handpicked surgeon general, the anti-vaccine charlatan Joseph Ladapo, school vaccine rates for non-COVID diseases fell in 2022 to the lowest level in 10 years. Its rate fell again this year, by an appalling 0.6 percentage points to 4.5%, the 12th worst in the nation.
States with responsible leaders respond to trends that threaten public health to that degree. After California’s 2010 outbreak of whooping cough (pertussis) — 9,120 cases, the most since 1947, the majority among unvaccinated children — the Legislature eliminated almost all non-medical exemptions for childhood immunization. California’s exemption rate of 0.2% in 2022-23 was the third best in the nation, after West Virginia and New York.
Can vaccine-resisters be reached with a rational counter-argument? One would think so. They tend not to be low-income, low-information residents — two of the most-vaccinated states are West Virginia and Mississippi.
Rather, they tend to come from more affluent, educated families, the sort of people who think they’re so smart they can decide healthcare policies for themselves, no matter how complex the issue.
In this respect, however, they’re just being stupid — and irresponsible. They should be receptive to reason. Let’s hope that it doesn’t take outbreaks of dangerous diseases like measles in their school districts to open their eyes.
OP's rebuttals in comment section...
Gee, could it be that we are letting third world unvaxed people in to our countrey carrying who knows what diseases ? Nah, it's RFK Jr's fault .
Would love a deep dig into measles. I keep hearing measles pushed into narrative forefront everytime anti-vaxx movement gains momentum (even before covid).
I had the “red” measles when I was 6 in 1959 long before the “MMR” came out. My dad was a MD ( pediatrician)and I ( and my younger sister) was in bed a couple of days — every body got it in grade school along with mumps and chickenpox— I’m still here — rarely get sick — never had a flu shot or any ‘vaccine ‘ since the 1960’s — I did get whooping cough ( worked alongside a lot of ‘immigrants’ from Mexico/ Guatemala as well as college kids) in my late 50’s — was rough and lost 10 pounds during the 4/6 weeks illness due to coughing causing vomiting after eating but still only missed 1-3 days of work. My mother had it as a 5-6 year old in the early 1930’s ( house with no heat except small wood stove in front room ) yet she lived to mid 80’s and the whooping cough isn’t what she died of (pertussis for medical terminology) I have to think the unvaccinated kids are better off than the vaccinated especially with more and more diseases crossing into the country daily— they will get sick— sure but nutrition and living conditions are pretty great now — the main problems I see is most kids live in daycare or school and aren’t outside dawn to dusk like we were ( vitamin D is essential to immune health) and parents— mother — isn’t home to tend to ill child ( also important) nature always culls the weak to produce stronger progeny for the future— I guess we’ll all just have to “hide and watch “
I heard long ago the high fever that accompanies measles provides protection against cancers later in life. Vaccinating against measles leads to a susceptibility to cancer later if you never battle that fever, is the thought. Trying to remember where I read or heard this.
fever is a rabbit hole.
can approach it like a limit in math.
what happens as fever approaches... 103F ? 104F etc
Good point. It's their poster child for vaxines.
I don't have time or I would try to research it.
https://i.redd.it/mj7wgrt6cyh21.jpg
Blames the unvaxed,she must be a racist as most of the immigrants are unvaxed.
If it works unvaxed are not a problem.
We used to have measles parties.
But the real problem is all the illegals coming into the country with all kinds of diseases. Are they being vaccinated? No. So it is an intentional biological attack.
euphemist for paid propagandist?
Hyperbole much?
if we just stop right here, and ask ourselves, "is Robert F Kennedy actually coming for our health? and if so, then how, and why, and when ...
However, i believe RFK jr is NOT coming for my health, so it makes me wonder why a Pulitzer Prize winning wind-bag like Michael Hiltzik would make such a defamatory statement, knowing good and well how litigious RFK jr is.
so, Michael Hiltzik is really concerned about "deaths of children", but at the same time, Michael Hiltzik is probably really concerned about human overpopulation, and its effects on the environment, and man-made climate change, and whatever else the NWO-UN-WHO-WEF tells him to worry about.
oh, and how does Michael Hiltzik feel about 63,000,000 abortions since RvW?
just some meaningless clumps of cells, I'm sure.
to be clear, before the invention of the measles vaccine, almost 95% of all people worldwide would get measles at some point in their life.
some children died, but most lived. and the ones who died of measles, probably had a defect at birth that would have made them more vulnerable to every sort of infection, leading to a lifetime of illnesses.
"survival of the fittest"
~ trust the science
first of all UNICEF is another sketchy-shady CIA-backed operation, that you don't want anything to do with, so why even quote them?
surely Michael Hiltzik is aware of what UNICEF is,
and yet he affiliates himself with them anyway, as if it lends him more credibility rather than detracts from his credibility?
note: whenever you hear the word SURGE in the news, its FAKE NEWS.
Rick Santorum never SURGED in Iowa Caucuses. that was 100% media fabrication.
There is no clearer sign of a breakdown in pro-vaccine narratives.
Thats because these supposed "measles" cases were FAKE NEWS, cooked up so that California could pass Sen Richard Pan's bills stripping parents the right to opt of out vaccines.
Let the record reflect that Sen Richard Pan's own parents are immigrants to America, who fled their home country to get away from people like Sen Richard Pan.
The 2019 surge was attributed to pockets of unvaccinated people spreading the virus. A spike also appeared in 2014, when more than half the 667 cases were attributed to unvaccinated Amish communities in Ohio.
"attributed to" by the vaccine propagandists.
had this been a real measles outbreak, and there was enough people in the population who had not had a vaccine, or been infected, this measles would have become endemic again.
but that didn't happen, because this story was fake news.
wow Michael Hiltzik is a pathological liar. i think Martin Luther wrote a book about him you can find the title at wikipedia.
the truth is, the so-called "ANTI-VACCINE" movement is a misnomer.
it SHOULD be called the "EX-VACCINE movement, because most of the people in the "anti-vaccine movement" USED TO BE pro-vaccine!
the single leading "cause" of any "anti-vaccine" activism, is a direct, first-hand experience with a vaccine.
the real reason the anti-vaccine movement is GROWING at such a high rate, its because its directly proportional to the number of people who had a bad experience with a vaccine!
but you don't want to talk about that, do you Michael Hiltzik?
you'd rather pretend that "right-wingers" are somehow causing previously pro-vaccine people to suddenly become anti-vaccine?
how exactly are "right wingers" able to accomplish this impressive feat?
by telling the left-wingers that vaccines cause autism?
left-wingers don't need to be told that vaccines cause autism, because they already know, from first hand experience.
everyone knows an autistic kid now in 2023
the anti-vaccine movement has nothing to do with your personal politics, as much as it has to do with your personal experience with vaccines.
and generally speaking, its the left-wingers who are more pro-vaccine, and thus more likely to take vaccines, and therefore more likely to suffer a bad experience of some sort.
the right-wingers don't even take the vaccines, so therefore they aren't motivated to be "even more anti-vaccine", by a bad personal experience with a vaccine
what Michael Hiltzik would rather do, is to LIE to his audience, and pretend right-wingers forwarding anti-vaccine disinfo memes are are somehow causing an even bigger anti-vaccine movement ... on the left?
Michael Hiltzik can't tell the truth, because the truth would be devastating to his pro-vaccine narratives.
OK, we all know who the "Council on Foreign Relations" (CFR) is, so why would Michael Hiltzik be affiliating himself with the CFR?
theres that word "surge" again.
notice how Michael Hiltzik lies again, and again,
this time attributing these so-called "outbreaks" to "anti-vaccine sentiment"
with what evidence is this attribution made?
and why does he simply say "anti-vaccine sentiment" instead of elaborating on where the roots of this anti-vaccine sentiment comes from?
so it was the anti-vaccine movement that somehow "politicized" the (COVID shots are NOT vaccines).
the (NOT a vaccine) wasn't "politicized" when it was given under duress to billions of people worldwide.
Michael Hiltzik appears to be a new-comer to the vaccine debate, since he seems to have transposed a few key moments in vaccine debate history.
below, he implies that "anti-vaxxers" BEGAN as being opposed to COVID vaccine mandates, AND THEN became opposed to ALL childhood vaccine mandates.
it sounds good, but is it true?
yes and no.
no, its not true, because "actual" anti-vaxxers pre-date COVID, and were opposed to childhood vaccine madness long before COVID.
yes, its true for NEW anti-vaccine people, who have only just recently jumped on the anti-vaccine bandwagon.
and WHERE did all these NEW anti-vaccine activists come from?
They had a bad experience with a COVID vaccine,
and very likely under duress to take that COVID vaccine.
so yes, the newbie anti-vaxxers would logically become more opposed to more than just COVID mandates
that 95% for herd immunity. thats not true. ask to see how they figure...
and here is where Michael Hiltzik really shows himself to be the very dishonest paid propagandist...
WRONG
Dr Wakefield never made any such claim.
what Dr Wakefield did do, was to recommend more research in this area.
and what was the de facto response?
"more research in this area"
and Dr Wakefield apparently had an undisclosed conflict of interest,
whereby Wakefield had made some investments that stood to make money, if the MMR vaccine was broken into 3 individual vaccines,
which was Wakefield's supposedly unforgivable sin.
he stood to profit off of his unique insider knowledge, pretty much like everyone else in the world does every day.
propagandists like Michael Hiltzik like to attribute the decline in vaccine update to Wakefield's obscure paper that nobody ever read,
which has caused me to suspect Wakefield might be a foil. a fall guy. controlled opposition. Wakefield was set up to make a bad study, and then that study would get retracted with great fanfare,
And for the next 100 years, whenever the vaccine/autism debate would come up, paid shills like Michael Hiltzik would just point at Wakefield's retracted study.
and they would have gotten away with it too... if it wasn't for those meddling kids...
the truth is, the reason so many parents believe that vaccines caused their child's autism, is because they saw it happen with their own two eyes.
and then the parents get gas-lit about what caused their child's autism.
nope, couldn't be vaccines.
wakefield paper was retracted with cause.
settled science.
case closed.
theres that word "surge" again, so again we know this is FAKE NEWS.
and notice how the paid propagandist Michael Hiltzik accidentally-yet-correctly makes the astute observation that the "surging" measles cases had caused the vaccine rate to recover,
which is the big give-away for the entire charade.
vaccine rate: goes down?
fake news: measles outbreak!
vaccine rate: goes up!
can't explain it.
indeed it was retracted, however Michael Hiltzik doesn't really want to delve into the details about how and why it was retracted.
first of all, there were something like 12 co-authors on this paper, and none of them faced any real consequences for their participation in wakefield's alleged fraud.
so either the co-authors knew it was all fraud,
or they were bamboozled by wakefield.
either proposition is a rabbit hole....
Just to be clear, what Kennedy is saying on the campaign trail, are the same claims he makes in a courtroom, when he is suing big corporations with big teams of lawyers. If his statements were false, that would be challenged in a court.
You can rest assured, that if Kennedy makes a statement about vaccines, he probably knows what he is talking about, and can cite sources for anything he says...
notice how Michael Hiltzik reduces Robert F Kennedy's vast knowledge of vaccines, down to "misinformation and disinformation"
and particularly Kennedy's knowledge of the actual evidence that has been submitted to various courts of law, and the findings of the courts.
Hiltzik doesn't want to address ANY of Kennedy's claims, for two reasons,
and give credibility to anti-vaccine side of the debate,
beyond his own superficial "understanding" of vaccines,
that hasn't been upgraded since kindergarten.
The FDA is supposed to be doing studies, as part of 1986 vaccine law, but when the FDA was sued to produce these studies, the FDA was unable to to produce any studies for last 30 years...
Kennedy fought for decades to get the mercury out of fish, but nobody called ever Kennedy anti-fish.
The truth is that the FDA doesn’t allow vaccines on the market unless they’ve been safety-tested. When a vaccine is introduced as a treatment for a disease for which no safe and effective vaccine exists, it’s subjected to one of those randomized, placebo-controlled trials.
"safety tested' is a farce.
these "studies" are designed NOT to find problems.
if these studies are even done at all.
these "studies" most likely begin with the conclusion they want, and work backward to create the so-called "data" they need, to get the pre-determined "safe and effective' result they want.
then they say you can't verify the data, because that invades the privacy of the study participants,
and yet, when paid propagandists Brian Deer interviewed Dr Wakefield's study participants, nobody seemed to be too concerned about the privacy of the study participants.
if we can't actually verify data, we might as well assume its made-up, fake data.
you got that? Paul Offit, a true giant in the field of vaccines,
wants you to know, that it would be "unethical" NOT to jab you with this brand new, never-before tested shot, because the consequence of NOT shooting up might be something as terrible as a coronavirus infection.
the so-called "inert placebo" is sometimes just another "safe and effective" vaccine.
since when can any vaccine, also considered to be an inert placebo?
Hunt can't expected to inform herself on the current state of the vaccine debate.
Kennedy is just a drop in the ocean of anti-vaccine sentiment.
Kennedy isn't the CAUSE OF anti-vaccine sentiment.
Kennedy is the RESULT OF anti-vaccine sentiment.
Polio is a rabbit hole.
Those study numbers seem made-up fake data.
At one time, "polio" was endemic. 95% of people got polio, and survived with no long lasting effects, they hyped the rare paralyzing cases
Most polio in the word today, is actually caused by polio "vaccines"
and the WHO blames anti-vaxxers who won't take polio vaccines, for the fact the only people who get polio anymore, get it from a vaccine!
...
Hey LA Times, something that most everyone learned from covid-1984: cases are not deaths. And are your cases being determined by a meaningless PCR test by any chance?
Affirmative.
Chances of contracting measles only present when you come into contact with someone who has it regardless of vaccination status. If find it hilarious that they tell kids to get vaxxed for it becuase of "herd immunity" and are told if they don't get vaccinated they could catch it and ..... spread it to others that ARE vaccinated. Uh. Ok so if the kid caught it they must have been in contact with someone who had it which means they would have caught it if they were vaccinated anyways.
Column: Why anti-vaxxers are pretending a flawed study on vaccine deaths has been vindicated
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-10-24/no-anti-vaxxers-this-flawed-and-retracted-study-of-vaccine-deaths-hasnt-been-reinstated