A few days ago, the US crossed the threshold of having the worst year of measles infections in the 21st century… only a little over halfway through the year.
Let’s go over a few of the red flags:
🚩 This outbreak (like many others) was started by unvaccinated Americans traveling abroad. Comments sections on social media are packed with folks who want to blame this on immigrants as if it were a border issue -but it is not. It is a failure of judgement and personal responsibility to care for one’s self, children, and community.
To be clear, I am not saying that immigration can’t cause outbreaks (because it can and has, and ironically involves ICE administering tens of thousands of vaccines to control it each time), I’m just pointing out that diseases do not respect abstract human geopolitical borders, and having a highly vaccinated population literally prevents immigration or travel from being a source of domestic infection.
🚩 Infections have mostly harmed unvaccinated Americans from a disease burden standpoint -but they have a deep economic impact on everyone. Hospitals fill with patients -mostly children, who are critically ill with pneumonia and/or encephalitis. Not only is their care very expensive, it was avoidable via an incredibly safe and effective vaccine that is a fraction of the cost of an ICU stay or a funeral.
If we genuinely seek to eliminate government fraud, waste, and abuse: look no further than Americans who subject their children to acute and chronic harm under the false guise of liberty.
🚩 If you think the human costs of infection are contained to those who choose not to vaccinate, remember that no infant can be vaccinated against measles until they are 6-12 months old, because doing so earlier makes it less effective. So the certainty of illness, suffering, and death is equally shared by a percentage of pro- and anti-vax parents alike, for the first year of life.
🚩 The rates of death and of intellectual disability from measles are roughly the same. For every child that dies, you can expect another to be left with profound brain injuries. It’s debatable which flavor of regret is more severe -but both can be avoided with vaccination.
🚩 If you believe that it can’t get any worse, you are wrong. We still have 5 more months of infections ahead of us before year’s end. And just because this is the worst year for measles that the US has seen in over 30 years, it can and will get much worse if attitudes about the safety and effectiveness of measles vaccination do not improve -and they are unlikely to with an ideologically compromised individual at the head of HHS.
Prior to mass vaccination efforts, measles killed 400-500 kids per year (that would be 720-900 today when adjusted for population growth since 1963), and just as many kids were left maimed. We are far from the bottom.
🚩 Lastly, inept leadership guarantees multiplication of failure. RFK Jr. has done everything in his power to minimize or dismiss the very real dangers of vaccine preventable illnesses, and to baselessly sew anxious reluctance to vaccination that he has a financial stake in.
RFK Jr. -outrageously- wants us to “stop trusting the experts,” likening trust in expertise to “totalitarianism or religion,” which is perhaps the dumbest and most hypocritical utterance in a long career of uttering dumb hypocrisy. Consider:
The vast majority of Mom’s for Liberty won’t let someone who isn’t a licensed cosmetologist expertly style their Karen-cut -but Kennedy wants them to ignore the advice of scientists and pediatricians on what is medically safe or dangerous for their children. The irony is so dense it makes me want to talk to the manager.
Every Proud Boy who takes supplemental testosterone is very invested in the expertise of the process chemist who has verified that their synthesis yielded testosterone instead of estradiol, which while chemically similar, does not induce the desired biological effects. Tactical vests fit poorly when shapely, unmistakably female breasts develop beneath, warping their large inventory of attached EDC flashlights, knives, and flex cuffs across an unintended, uncanny valley of voluptuous cleavage.
RFK Jr. himself expects that every tanning salon he attends has taken steps to assure that the highly carcinogenic radiation delivered to his tandoori hide is compliant with the performance standards for UV output determined by the FDA, so that he doesn’t end up in the hospital covered in full-thickness burns -this is expertise that he claims we should ignore, but expects to enjoy himself.
Even worse, Kennedy spent decades promoting his own legal services as expert in nature, and yet he has decreed expertise an anathema to favorable outcomes in complex intellectual fields. Which is it? Were his legal services highly desirable because he was a bumbling amateur, or were they always completely incompetent because he sinfully delivered them as an expert? It’s odd how his own advice condemns his personal history of credibility in the field he loudly claims expertise in.
Ignoring experts (in any context) is madness that leads to predictable harm, and isn’t routinely practiced by anyone with an IQ north of 70, and post-pubescent levels of impulse control. Advocating for the public to actively ignore the expertise of scientists and health experts on medical matters as the highest appointed authority on health is, for lack of a better term treasonous, given that Kennedy’s efforts work directly at odds with his sworn duty to improve (or even just maintain) the health of the nation.
This is not a partisan issue -it is an attack on reason at the expense of health and life itself, and both have already been unnecessarily sacrificed. Do not allow your political leanings to sway your belief in the things that you do not understand, but experts do. No one knows everything, but experts know a lot about a single topic. Cognitive division of labor is the very foundation of civilization itself. To equate social epistemology with totalitarianism is to discard the body of knowledge that mankind has collectively amassed over centuries of struggle to understand nature itself.
If you trust your mechanic to fix your car when you cannot…
If you trust your plumber to restore your home’s connection to a sewer when you cannot…
If you trust your gunsmith to ream the chamber of your AR-15 so that your DIY wildcat conversion doesn’t explode when you fire it…
- then you should absolutely trust your physician’s advice on how to keep your children from suffering or dying of preventable diseases, because there is still ample room for greater disaster by failing to appreciate the harsh repercussions of ignoring reality.
Write your representatives to terminate RFK Jr.
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