Make measles great again

Republican anti-vaxx politics is already making children sick, and it’s going to get a lot worse:

However, measles cases declined precipitously after 1963, when a vaccine was licensed. (My wife, born in 1959, never caught it.) By 1980 all states had laws requiring that children entering school be vaccinated, although most allowed exemptions for religious beliefs. Measles vaccines don’t just protect the person vaccinated; by ensuring that very few children catch the disease, they also break potential chains of infection. So in 2000 the CDC declared measles in the United States eliminated.

But now there’s a significant outbreak in Texas. Only 48 cases have been identified so far (13 of whom have been hospitalized), but officials believe that there are hundreds more that haven’t been reported.

As far as I can tell, nobody following disease trends is surprised by this development, nor does anyone think it’s a one-time event; this is probably just the first of many outbreaks of measles and other infectious diseases we thought had been eliminated.

The reason is simple. Measles was eliminated, for a while, because vaccination was near-universal. The “target” vaccination rate, sufficient to prevent community transmission, is 95 percent. But much of the nation has now fallen well below that target:

So the widespread return of measles was just a matter of time.

How did this happen? The answer, of course, is politics, specifically Republican politics.

As an illuminating article in Lancet notes, anti-vaccine activism was originally a fringe movement with a “natural-living, left-leaning base.” Translation: it was more or less a hippie thing. In fact, you can still see some traces of those roots in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s incoherent views on health policy — views that unfortunately matter a lot now that he’s in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services.

But the anti-vax movement became powerful and deadly when it took over much of the political right.

The groundwork for that takeover was laid in the Reagan years. Reagan wasn’t specifically anti-vaccine. But he was anti-science — because, as I wrote recently, once you start rejecting scientific research that tells you things you don’t want to hear, you’re basically rejecting the whole scientific enterprise. And he also rejected the idea that the government can ever be a force for good.

As with many disturbing trends on the American right, as Krugman observes this long predates Trump. (Indeed, Trump is less anti-vaxx than the typical Republican now — his only positive achievement being the rapid development of an effective COVID vaccine didn’t stop the Republican opposition to vaccination at all.) Any now every single Senate Republican owns it (including Mitch McConnell, who may be voting against some of Trump’s nominees but did more than anyone else to preserve Trump’s political viability.)