Despite attempts by RFK Jr. and his allies in rural Pennsylvania to deny it, the administration’s anti-vaxx campaign is having exactly the effect it intends (people getting sick and dying) [gift link]:
Following America’s recent measles deaths, anti-vaccine activists have cast doubt on the virus as the culprit. They’ve pointed to a victim’s underlying health conditions or, as they did last year in Texas, blamed hospital error. But the two latest measles deaths in Pennsylvania—bringing the state’s total to four since mid-August—have made the United States’ measles crisis undeniable.
Last month, the Pennsylvania Department of Health announced two measles-associated deaths; both cases were later revealed to be infants too young to have been vaccinated. In response, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who was an anti-vaccine activist for decades before becoming health secretary—wrote on X that the deaths might have been “altogether fabricated.” (He later acknowledged a coroner’s conclusion that one of the deaths had been caused by measles.) Then, last weekend, an unvaccinated 40-year-old woman died in Jefferson County; immediately, people on Reddit and X insisted that her death wasn’t really caused by measles, because she’d had asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, both of which can make breathing difficult. Yesterday, state officials revealed that an unvaccinated 18-year-old died from a rare inflammatory condition of the brain and spinal cord that can be triggered by measles. Some commenters online deemed that death suspicious too.
What the armchair epidemiologists miss is that vulnerability to the infection doesn’t make a death less real. The two infants both tested positive for measles. The Lancaster County coroner’s office determined that one infant died of a ruptured spleen; however, when I spoke with that child’s parents, they told me that the mother had been extremely ill with the disease when she gave birth, the baby was not breathing when he was born, and they believed measles had killed their son. The other infant was born with a rare neurological condition, but the coroner found that measles was ultimately the cause of death. Greg Furlong, the Jefferson County coroner who investigated the 40-year-old woman’s death, told me that although the woman had conditions that made her vulnerable to measles, and was on supplemental oxygen, she was active before she contracted the virus. She cooked for her family and cleaned the house. Measles killed her in about a week. “If she wouldn’t have got the measles, would she still be alive today? I say yes,” Furlong, a Republican who is also the mayor of Summerville, said.
Four deaths in roughly four weeks suggest that the state is in the midst of an enormous outbreak. The Pennsylvania health department lists total cases at 693, with 99 in the past week. But considering that measles kills about one to three of every 1,000 children it infects, the actual number is likely much larger. Milder cases are going unreported. Many who fall ill, particularly in the Amish community, aren’t getting tested; the Amish parents of the infant who died with a ruptured spleen told me that their 13 living children had all caught the virus, but they never got swabbed.
These deaths are occurring after three unvaccinated people, including two young girls, died of measles in Texas and New Mexico last year. Those were the first measles deaths in the country in a decade. The last time the United States experienced four measles deaths in a calendar year was in 1992, at the tail end of a years-long outbreak that killed more than 100 Americans. That resurgence led to a recommendation that children receive two doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, and prompted a nationwide push to increase vaccination rates. It worked, and measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000. But overall kindergarten vaccination rates started declining during the coronavirus pandemic, and some areas, including Lancaster County, have fallen well below the 95 percent needed to maintain herd immunity.
The strategy that RFK Jr. is using to try to deny responsibility for the effects of his measles outbreak is the same one Bari Weiss tried to use to diminish the impact of the food blockade in Gaza — since the people who face the worst consequences are often those with other health problems, pretend that it’s really only the other health problems that matter, The cynicism and amorality in both cases is readily apparent. There are people dead who would still be alive in Pennsylvania if not for RFK Jr.’s tireless anti-vaccine activism, and many many more who have become seriously ill.
Meanwhile, let’s check in on the man in the hot dog costume:
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) on Wednesday said the nation’s worst measles outbreak in the United States in 35 years is “going to be a terrible legacy for this administration,” citingrecent deaths in Pennsylvania.
“Misinformation and misguided policies are leaving children and adults unprotected against disease that we know how to prevent,” Cassidy, a physician and chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said at the outset of a hearing for three key administration nominees.
If only Cassidy was in a position of power that would have allowed him to stop RFK Jr. from becoming Secretary of Health and Human Services, which happened through a mysterious process nobody has been able to fully identify.