Tag: measles outbreak
With Trump And RFK Jr., America Faces A Deadly Outbreak Of Disease And Lies

With Trump And RFK Jr., America Faces A Deadly Outbreak Of Disease And Lies

In case you wondered about those empty desks around you at work or why your regular checkout person at the supermarket is missing, we're going through the worst flu season in 15 years, according to the Associated Press, NPR, the National Geographic, and NBC News. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) -- yes, amazingly, their doors are still open -- estimates that as many as 19,000 have died from the flu this season, with 86 of that number being children. There have been at least 900,000 hospitalizations from the flu. Both flu figures have been worse than COVID over this winter.

With flu hospitalizations and deaths at record numbers, it's reasonable to ask what's being done about it other than checking people into emergency rooms and preparing bodies for burial. You could find your answer yesterday in the White House, where Donald “I like my numbers low” Trump held his first cabinet meeting. Remember that one from the early days of COVID?

A few cases had been logged on the West Coast, most of them coming in on flights from China, when it was reported that the deadly virus had broken out on a cruise ship. The number of cases that had been listed so far was something like 15, so Trump ordered the cruise ship to be held at the dock with nobody allowed to debark. “I like my numbers low,” Trump announced, as if keeping people from crossing a gangplank meant that they didn't have to be counted.

A reporter asked the new Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., about the outbreak of measles in western Texas, entirely among unvaccinated children and adults. Kennedy proceeded to tell a string of lies about the number of cases, explaining away hospitalizations for reasons of quarantine, and telling an outright lie about the number who have been hospitalized.

The question could have been about the recent outbreak in severe flu cases, and similar lies would have fallen out of Kennedy's mouth. He lied to the Senate when he was up for confirmation, telling them that he would abide by CDC vaccination guidelines. Two days after he took office, Kennedy ordered that the guidelines be “investigated.”

On Thursday, Kennedy ordered the cancellation of an FDA meeting of a vaccine advisory panel, without explanation. The panel meets every January or February to recommend the flu strains that will be covered by next year's shot. Without the panel's recommendation, drug manufacturers can't start making the flu vaccine. Litjen Tan, co-chair of the flu shot advocacy group the National Adult and Influenza Immunization Summit, told NBC News that manufacturers can wait until late March for the FDA to pick the flu strain for next year, but no longer. Delaying the meeting of the vaccine advisory panel pretty much ensures that the flu vaccine for next fall’s season will not be ready by July or August as it usually is.

Convincing people to get vaccinated is always a struggle, especially after the entirely ginned-up controversy over the COVID vaccine that has infected our politics for the last four years. The number of people vaccinated for the flu this season is seven percent lower than last year, reflecting the vaccine hesitancy that has grown recently. About 45 percent of Americans received the vaccine this season.

Tracy and I were two of them, and glad I was when I was taken to the emergency room in early January suffering the worst symptoms I had ever experienced. Lying in bed at home that night, I couldn't move my arms or legs and thought that I had suffered a stroke or even something worse. It wasn't until the EMT's got here and checked me that a stroke was ruled out. I was astonished when I was got to the emergency room and had a blood test to learn that I had this year's virulent strain of the flu. During my five day stay in the hospital, I learned that people my age with pre-existing conditions were much more likely to die when they hadn't been vaccinated.

More than a hundred deaths from measles, a disease that had been all but eradicated before the anti-vaxxers started spreading their lies about the MMR vaccine. RFK Jr. and his misleadingly-named Children's Defense Fund were among the chief spreaders of the lies about the vaccine that had made measles a thing of the past until they came along. Now Kennedy has predictably started in on the flu vaccine, an entirely non-controversial yearly step taken by many to protect themselves from a seemingly ordinary disease that can kill adults and maim children with brain conditions like encephalitis.

We should have learned last time around what happens when you allow prevaricators and profiteers anywhere near the health of Americans. Remember when Trump put his nephew Jared Kushner in charge of the distribution of hospital scrubs, surgical masks, and even ventilators, and we learned that they were basically auctioning off lifesaving equipment to the highest bidder? Remember when Trump got behind Ivermectin, a veterinary heartworm drug, as a cure for COVID? Just wait. The next thing we're going to be hearing is that the CDC has ordered a study of Ivermectin to test its efficacy as a cure for measles and the flu.

People were dying in the flu ward in the hospital where I was being treated. I would say that I was lucky I wasn't one of them, but luck had nothing to do with it. I got vaccinated, and Tracy didn't listen to me when I told her that calling 911 wasn’t necessary. I spent five days in the hospital and the rest of the month of January recovering from the worst illness I've contracted since I had pneumonia at age 18. I had never been hospitalized for anything other than surgery or a lesser invasive procedure like a stent since the two weeks I spent hospitalized with pneumonia more than five decades ago.

The one good thing that came out of Elon Musk bouncing around the White House cabinet room like a crazed Muppet and RFK Jr. being hit with a question about measles is that their lies were well covered. The news was packed with stories about Kennedy’s measles lies and Musk’s lies about the firings of USAID experts on Ebola during an ongoing outbreak in Africa. It's the one advantage to rule by knaves and buffoons: They're bound to take out their dicks and stomp on them often enough that their lies get noticed.

In the meantime, people will die, just as they did when Trump was driving this country into the ditch during COVID, and now he’s got help from the odious RFK Jr.

Here we go again.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com -- from which this is reprinted with permission -- and follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.


Rand Paul’s Weak Case Against Mandatory Vaccines

Rand Paul’s Weak Case Against Mandatory Vaccines

The middle of a measles outbreak may not seem like the best time to stand up for the eccentric preferences of the people who caused it. But Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is a libertarian, which means he is used to challenging conventional wisdom. His thoughts on mandatory vaccinations, however, only confirm that conventional wisdom is sometimes genuine wisdom.

At a hearing Tuesday, Paul made two points in opposition to requiring measles inoculations for children. The first: “For myself and my children, I believe that the benefits of vaccines greatly outweigh the risks, but I still do not favor giving up on liberty for a false sense of security.”

The second: “There doesn’t seem to be enough evidence” that “parents who refuse to vaccinate their children risk spreading these diseases to the immunocompromised community.”

These were in keeping with his past statements. In 2015, he rejected mandatory vaccinations on the ground that “the state doesn’t own your children” while claiming to have “heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines” — though he later said, somewhat implausibly, that he didn’t mean to suggest vaccines caused the disorders.

All states require children to be vaccinated against various communicable diseases to enroll in public schools. But most let parents refuse if they have religious objections — and some let them decline for any reason. That turns out to be dangerous.

Paul is wrong on the issue of freedom versus public health, as many prominent libertarian thinkers agree. Individuals do have rights, and they include the right to decide what risks to take with their own lives and property. But they aren’t free to subject others to deadly harms.

Before a vaccine was invented, 450 to 500 Americans died each year of measles. By 2000, it had been eradicated in this country. But with the spread of anti-vaccine propaganda and state exemptions, the disease has made a comeback, infecting 159 people this year. Some legislatures are now considering abolishing virtually all exemptions as California, Mississippi and West Virginia have done.

Many so-called public health measures are really about private health — preventing people from harming themselves, say through smoking or drinking sugary soft drinks. Libertarians have good reason to oppose them. But mandatory vaccinations are about protecting people from the dangerous practices of their fellow citizens.

Parents have no right to expose other people — notably those too young or too sick to be inoculated — to a serious contagion by refusing to vaccinate their children. For that matter, they have no right to expose even their own kids to measles. The government doesn’t own them, but it is entitled to intervene to shield them from harm, even at the hands of their parents.

Libertarians look back fondly on the days when government was far less intrusive. But even then, mandatory immunizations were upheld by the Supreme Court.

In 1905, the court ruled in favor of such requirements, reasoning that “in every well-ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand.”

Critics claim that vaccines are unreasonably dangerous to recipients, causing autism and other ailments. But all the evidence is against them.

The American Academy of Pediatrics says: “Vaccines are safe. Vaccines are effective. Vaccines save lives. Claims that vaccines are linked to autism, or are unsafe when administered according to the recommended schedule, have been disproven by a robust body of medical literature.”

After seeing Paul’s suggestion that unvaccinated kids are no threat to people with weakened immunity, I emailed his office asking for documentation. An aide got back to me but offered no evidence.

But Paul is wrong. Dr. Sean O’Leary, a spokesman for the AAP, told me that measles “is certainly potentially deadly, especially among the immunocompromised, and we now relatively have a much larger group of immunocompromised people in the U.S., thanks to new disease-modifying medications, better cancer treatments, etc. Many of the deaths from varicella (chickenpox) in the U.S. prior to the varicella vaccine were in immunocompromised patients.”

Steve Chapman blogs at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman. Follow him on Twitter @SteveChapman13 or at https://www.facebook.com/stevechapman13. To find out more about Steve Chapman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Rise Of The Know-Betters: Just The Facts About Anti-Vaxx

Rise Of The Know-Betters: Just The Facts About Anti-Vaxx

The anti-vaccination movement, a species of stupidity that crosses party lines and is immune to evidence (if little else), has emerged from the curio cabinet of fringe lunacies and ambled into the spotlight on the heels of a public health crisis — and is now becoming an unfortunate flashpoint in the opening salvos of the 2016 primaries. Why, after all, are we even talking about this?

The Republican Party, so unmoved by science on climate change and evolution, for the most part has refreshingly come out in rousing support of vaccines. Even Ben Carson says there should be no exemptions from vaccination. So who exactly are editorials like this aimed at? Why are too many children under-vaccinated? Why are pundits and pols waffling on the merits of discredited studies and paranoid theories? In the Year of our Lord Two-Thousand-Fifteen, how has the efficacy of vaccines entered the political discussion? Into what fresh hell have we blundered?

The current measles outbreak has thrust a conversation about the supposed dangers of vaccines — as useless and noxious as a pertussal wheeze — into the mainstream. Chris Christie and Rand Paul, perhaps sensing a nucleus of vaccine skeptics in Florida or Ohio, contributed their thoughts, suggesting that vaccinations might actually become a touchstone issue for the 2016 elections (as we dread they might). And in the scrimmage of wacky one-upmanship that is a hallmark of primaries, you may reasonably expect to see a spectrum of weaselly, “teach the controversy” positions, all in a cynical bid to poach votes from anti-vaxxers of both parties.

The to-vaxx-or-not-to-vaxx issue has forged a strange fellowship between black helicopter right wingers, who believe vaccination is just a step away from martial law, and crunchy granola left wingers who buy into the fallacy of an “all-natural” lifestyle. A poll on the main page of Life Health Choices (a resource for anti-vaxxers) asks: “Is vaccination choice a fundamental human right?” — erroneously positioning the issue as one of individual liberty and a parent’s right to raise his or her child without government intervention. Such attitudes mesh with the folly of well-educated, liberal parents who want to raise their children completely free of all “chemicals.” In both cases, the cri de coeur is “I know better!”

Together they form an unholy union born of shared unreason, which an acquaintance of mine calls the “Know-Better Party.” All the studies and medical testimony in the world doesn’t nudge the Know-Betters. Their self-perception as responsible parents and free thinkers depends on their rejection of whatever wisdom they hold to be conventional: It doesn’t matter exactly where they fall along party lines; all that matters is they know better than you.

If you’re a Know-Better, then what are you doing here? Whether or not facts have any currency with you, whether or not you agree with the overwhelming majority of doctors, you’ve already made up your mind. So thanks for reading this far. Did you come here to be outraged; to shake your head in disapproval; to decry us as child murderers, cynical clickbaiters, choir preachers; to urge new research into the safety and efficacy of vaccines; to tell us that none of this is news?

In that, if nothing else, we may agree. There is no news here. There is no ethical dilemma. There is no startling research waiting in the wings. There is in fact no controversy. This article is an ouroboros decrying its own existence. The Know-Betters have taken enough of our time. All that’s left are the same old facts, to which we dutifully direct you:

But perhaps most sobering of all is a recent study in Pediatrics suggesting that whatever you believe, your mind cannot be changed:

Current public health communications about vaccines may not be effective. For some parents, they may actually increase misperceptions or reduce vaccination intention. Attempts to increase concerns about communicable diseases or correct false claims about vaccines may be especially likely to be counterproductive.

If that is true — and it seems in poor taste for us to discount a study when it suits us — then, well, our bad.

Photo: v1ctor Casale via Flickr

Shop our Store

Headlines

Editor's Blog

Corona Virus

Trending

World