You can click on the above graphic and zoom in and out to make it more legible. It shows the incidence of measles by state beginning in the late 1920s up to current times. The palest blues indicate less than one case per 100,000 population. As the incidence of measles rises, the blue at first darkens before turning yellow, orange, and, finally, red when there get to be more than 2000 cases per 100,000 people. The black vertical line marks the introduction of the measles vaccine in 1963. Lots of light blue to the right of the black line! It didn’t occur to people to resist life-saving advances in the days before the Internet made it easy to “conduct your own research.”
For the reality-based community, the graphic tells the story of a public health triumph. But we all now live in Trumplandia, where, according to the president-elect, Robert F Kennedy Jr is about to “go wild on health.” Kennedy is one of those people whose only apparent gift is for taking himself seriously, a recognizable syndrome among the mediocre high-born. He and Trump deserve each other and, considering that the election was free and fair, you could say that we all deserve them both.
Anyway, here is an article, “Fact-checking Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on Vaccines, Autism, and Covid-19,” from back when he was a vanity presidential candidate not yet on Team Trump. MAGAites hate the fact checking function of journalism, for pretty much the same reason that felons hate prosecutors. I’d forgotten about the part Kennedy played in a measles outbreak a few years ago:
In 2018, two infants in American Samoa died when nurses accidentally prepared the combined measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine with expired muscle relaxant rather than water. The Samoan government temporarily suspended the vaccination program, and anti-vaccine advocates—including Kennedy and his nonprofit—flooded the area with misinformation. The vaccination rate dropped to a dangerously low level. The next year, when a traveler brought measles to the islands, the disease tore through the population, sickening more than 5700 people and killing 83, most of them young children.
Maybe Kennedy can “go wild” and do for the whole country what he did for American Samoa. That’s where the anti-vax bus drops you off. Make America great again, bring back measles! The whole article is interesting in a discouraging sort of way. Kennedy’s public health expertise has been exhausted if it’s true that he told Trump to eat less Wendy’s. Of course he should be in charge!
And the guy from Fox & Friends to head up the Pentagon, perfect.
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