Cassidy’s kids

One of the worst legacies of the Trump administration is cementing the incredibly destructive idea that vaccination should be a matter of atomistic consumer choice:

The share of U.S. kindergartners with exemptions from school vaccine requirements for the 2025-2026 school year rose to another record high, according to federal data posted Monday. The sharp increase from 3.6 to 4.2 percent seeking exemptions — about 155,000 students — extends a years-long erosion of childhood immunization rates as the country battles its worst measles resurgence in 35 years.

As exemptions increased, U.S. kindergarten vaccination rates fell slightly for all reported vaccines from the year before. Coverage for the major vaccines required for kindergarten — MMR (measles, mumps and rubella); DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis); poliovirus vaccine (polio); and varicella (chicken pox) — decreased in more than half of states for the second year in a row, the CDC said.

Trump last week directed federal health officials to move toward giving the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines separately rather than in the combined MMR shot and to space out childhood vaccinations over more medical visits. The combined shot has been a cornerstone of measles prevention for decades, and separate measles, mumps and rubella vaccines are not currently available in the United States.

The proposal defies guidance from major medical groups and is directly at odds with CDC’s own scientific guidance.

“No published scientific evidence shows any benefit in separating the combination MMR vaccine into three individual shots,” the agency says on its MMR vaccine safety page as of Monday. Elsewhere on CDC’s website, the agency says combination vaccines reduce the number of injections children receive while providing the same protection and may help more children get recommended vaccinations on time.

The cynicism of trying to break up the MMR shots is particularly blatant, as the quantity of vaccinations properly required before age 18 is a core anti-vaxx talking point.

Meanwhile, the man who could have stopped RFK Jr. and didn’t remains unrepentant even though it failed to even save his miserable political career:

While appearing on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” last week, Cassidy avoided answering questions about whether he regrets voting for RFK Jr.

“Well, so first, this is a presidential executive order. RFK told me he was not going to change the ACIP,” Cassidy said, referencing the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which creates official federal recommendations and schedules for vaccine use.

“So, if you’re going to tell me that somebody didn’t tell me the truth, and I should have like, you know, seen in the future that they were not going to tell the truth. You can say ‘Oh Bill, you should have seen into the future,’ in which case I’d be on your show talking about the futures of stocks as opposed to vaccine policy,” he added.

Right, who could have predicted that the nation’s most prominent opponent of vaccines, who was appointed to a position for which he was wholly unqualified solely because of his opposition to vaccines, would undermine vaccinations? It is simply impossible to know something like this, or whether it will be hot in Phoenix in July.