Is it a political mistake to kill your voters and their children? That hypothesis will soon be tested.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent mass firing of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is only the latest step in his years-long campaign against vaccination. In the face of a measles outbreak in Texas, he spread misinformation and trumpeted quack remedies. He has canceled vaccine development, cut off research into vaccine hesitancy and joined Elon Musk in massively cutting his agency’s budget and staff.
Kennedy has this power because his support helped elect Trump, and this is his reward.
Democrats ought to hold the Trump administration accountable. Before that can happen, though, the public needs to understand the danger.
Here are the facts about measles, the most contagious of the diseases that Kennedy threatens to bring back to America. You can get it by entering a room where an infected person was two hours earlier. It causes long-term damage to the immune system, leaving children at risk of illness from other diseases for years.
About one child out of every 1,000 who get measles will develop encephalitis (swelling of the brain). This can lead to convulsions and leave the child deaf or with an intellectual disability. Between one and three of every 1,000 children who become infected will die from respiratory and neurologic complications.
Unvaccinated people pose a constant threat, since infants cannot be immunized until they are a year old. In Germany in 2000, an unvaccinated 11-year-old boy was taken to the pediatrician with a fever. He had measles and infected six children in the waiting room, including three babies. Two of them developed an incurable complication that usually appears years after the victim seems to have recovered. It produces first cognitive impairment and behavioral problems, then seizures, and finally slow deterioration and death. That is what happened to those two infants.
One study found that, for babies who get measles before being vaccinated, the rate of this complication is one in 609. Try scaling that up to the U.S. population.
Kennedy has promoted the myth, since debunked, that the measles vaccine causes autism. He once stated, “Measles outbreaks have been fabricated to create fear that in turn forces government officials to ‘do something.’ They then inflict unnecessary and risky vaccines on millions of children for the sole purpose of fattening industry profits.”
He has also said, “I’m a freedom-of-choice person” about vaccines.
But if his newly reconstituted committee removes vaccines from the schedules, families will lose insurance coverage for vaccination and may not be able to choose to vaccinate. The freedom he is talking about is the freedom to kill children, one’s own and other people’s.
Kennedy’s replacements for the CDC’s experts are unqualified, and a few of them are anti-vaccine cranks. He also has promoted the quack notion that measles can be treated with Vitamin A, and HHS even sent doses of the vitamin to Texas after an outbreak. People evidently believed him, and children in West Texas were hospitalized for Vitamin A overdoses.
Elections are sometimes won by raising issues that had not been in the news but that voters can unexpectedly be convinced to care about. Democrats have an opportunity here.
The worst thing the Trump administration has done — and it is an extremely competitive field — is the destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Since the administration cut off food and medical aid to foreign countries, about 300,000 people have died, most of them children. Millions more are threatened — including some Americans, because when mpox and drug-resistant tuberculosis spreads uncontrolled elsewhere, it will eventually find its way here.
Bill Gates responded by accelerating a $20 billion payout from his foundation to ameliorate the damage. That isn’t enough to compensate for Trump’s cuts, but it will save millions. Gates is a modern Oskar Schindler, rescuing people whom others are trying to kill.
Gates could be a model for other philanthropists — and, perhaps, political donors. Part of what makes the anti-vaccine movement so dangerous is that it is so well-funded. Its organizations raise more than $20 million a year, which they use to aggressively spread their lies on social media.
The same techniques could be deployed on behalf of the truth. But the largest organization that is trying, the Vaccine Integrity Project, has raised just $240,000. Once people understand the science, there could be political consequences. Even if there aren’t, countering the misinformation would certainly save lives.
Everybody should know the stories of Micha and Natalie, the two German children who were infected at the doctor’s office. Natalie died in 2011 and Micha in 2013. There are videos that show them when they were healthy, and then later when they were paralyzed and wheelchair-bound. The videos are horrible to watch. Everyone should see them. They show what it will mean to live in the Trump administration’s world full of unvaccinated people. Parents will helplessly watch their children sicken and die because Trump owed Kennedy a favor.
Most people don’t even know about SSPE. A social media campaign could change that. It would also put pressure on the Republican senators who voted to confirm Kennedy — all of them, except for polio survivor Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — to explain themselves. It might even help flip a Senate seat or two.
Are any billionaires reading this? You could be a Schindler, too.
Andrew Koppelman, the John Paul Stevens Professor of Law at Northwestern University, is the author of “Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed.”
