Yesterday, en route to the first event of the new school year, I heard this interview (“As school nears, doctors worry about Minnesota’s undervaccinated kids”) on the radio. My reasonably accurate transcription of the depressing conclusion:
Interviewer: As a physician, how worried are you about the rising rate of measles cases in our state?
Pediatrician: That is a growing cloud storm. We’ve seen the rate of measles immunizations decrease over the past few years, and we’ve already had 34 cases this year, almost all of them in unvaccinated kids. We worry about the start of the school year, when people are coming together, and this very infectious airborne disease . . . .
Interviewer: Vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella have been around since the 1960s. What do you tell parents who might be hesitant to have their kids vaccinated?
Pediatrician: You know, before the measles vaccine came out, the disease killed 2 to 3 million people per year worldwide. That number has gone down significantly and in many countries measles has been eliminated, including in this country until recently. The measles vaccine is very effective . . . . When you see one child with measles, you never want to see it again—high fever, often requiring hospitalization, horrible rash . . . . They’re really sick.
Waning support for mandatory school vaccinations among Republicans has been documented by, for example, the Gallup organization, here. After the Covid vaccines became available, public health researchers documented an increased risk of Covid mortality among Republicans: death rates were highest in counties Trump carried by the widest margins, and lowest in Biden’s best counties. The results of a study focusing on Covid mortality and political affiliation in Florida and Ohio, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, is here; an NPR summary of that study is here; and the same conclusions have been reached for other locales, in different studies: see, for example, here and here and here.
It’s not too much to say that voting Republican is literally bad for your health. It’s also bad for your kids and for neighbors who try to cancel your vote.
Trump has promised to defund school districts that require vaccinations. Now that the country’s most prominent vaccine opponent has endorsed him, I hope the two of them will campaign together on this issue in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Phoenix. I trust it’s a loser for them, and if it isn’t, we’re screwed anyway.
(Corollary: my debate advice for Harris would be to try not to talk too much. No one can make the case against Trump better than Trump.)
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