THE OTHER SIDE: Quackery kills - The Berkshire Edge

These days when it comes to picking the most practiced dissembler, we have too many choices. Why? Because America has transformed itself into the land of liars and lies. And so, yes, it is no longer easy to pick whose lies are most egregious. How about Kristi Noem who called murder victim Alex Pretti a domestic terrorist for his peaceful protest? Or perhaps it is Pam Bondi, who with every breath devalues our Department of Justice. She of the never-ending lies about the Epstein files could not even be bothered to turn around to look the victims of his sex-trafficking ring in the eye and apologize to them. Having delayed the release of the files, then redacting some of the most important information in them, it was the very least Bondi could have done.

Just maybe pick any one or all of those politicians, entertainers, educators, and bankers who continue to pretend they were not friends, allies, perhaps co-conspirators of Epstein. But having plunged into my recent painful deep dive into the quackery that envelops those in charge of our major public health agencies, I am going to have to stick with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and those he has deputized. They seem to have made it their lives’ work to curtail legitimate medical research and disparage and often fire those honest medical practitioners who remain committed to their oath and the scientific method.

Certainly, the very best case is that Kennedy, Jay Bhattacharya, and Vinay Prasad are legitimately confused; the worst case is that they have become used to spreading lies that kill people. Immune to self-reflection, let alone shame. In service to their antivaccine hysteria, they still mislead about mRNA, COVID, measles, and autism and seem never to notice the ever-mounting casualties amongst the unvaccinated.

I am still taken aback by the hypocrisy. As a journalist—and not to mention, like you, a potential victim of COVID-19—I was always wishing I had done better with my science courses. I found myself reading more and more and trying to better understand the COVID pandemic. I read various theories about the breeding ground of COVID, the bats who infected the uranium miners in the caves of China, about the gain of function experiments and possible leaks in the Wuhan labs and the Wuhan Wet Market where inflected wildlife might have been sold.

And, yes, I read about the exhaustive, miraculous discoveries that perfected the mRNA vaccine. As Wikipedia explains:

An mRNA vaccine is a type of vaccine that uses a copy of a molecule called messenger RNA (mRNA) to produce an immune response. The vaccine delivers molecules of antigen-encoding mRNA into cells, which use the designed mRNA as a blueprint to build foreign protein that would normally be produced by a pathogen (such as a virus) or by a cancer cell. These protein molecules stimulate an adaptive immune response that teaches the body to identify and destroy the corresponding pathogen or cancer cells. The mRNA is delivered by a co-formulation of the RNA encapsulated in lipid nanoparticles that protect the RNA strands and help their absorption into the cells.

Unfortunately, those now running every major public health agency in our country are deeply suspicious of mRNA vaccines. They refuse to acknowledge the extraordinary success of the mRNA vaccine and how it dramatically turned around the soaring hospitalization and death rates of the early days of COVID-19. And they are now actively working to curtail their use in fighting COVID, influenza, and measles.

In fact, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who has gone from pilotingand profiting from running America’s leading antivaccination public advocacy group, Children’s Health Defense—is now in charge of, and determined to severely limit, our national immunization infrastructure. I wrote last week about the effort to purge any grant requests to the National Institute of Health that support work on mRNA or address the growing problem of falling vaccination rates in the country.

You can get a sense of the borderline rage Kennedy brings to these issues in his book, “The Real Anthony Fauci“:

Kennedy argues that Dr. Anthony Fauci, a hero to many around the world, is really a greedy tyrant bent on trampling our democratic rights. Kennedy claims that in his pursuit of unimagined power, Fauci is destroying the American Republic. All of which is kind of rich coming from someone who has always lived the life of a millionaire and has now thrown his lot in with the power-hungry Donald Trump, the very man who, while enriching himself and his family a thousand times, is in the process of unravelling almost every gain we have made to extend voting rights, expand educational opportunities, and protect the environment. All the while dismantling our Constitutional rights. Yet it is Fauci, not Trump he goes after:

Kennedy contends that Dr. Fauci, together with Dr. Peter Hotez, did the bidding of big pharma, mismanaged the COVID pandemic, and caused massive suffering, even death:

[H]is 50-year regime has been calamitous for public health and for democracy. His administration of the COVID pandemic was, likewise, a disaster. As the world watched, Tony Fauci dictated a series of policies that resulted in by far the most deaths, and one of the highest percentage COVID-19 body counts of any nation on the planet. Only relentless propaganda and wall-to-wall censorship could conceal his disastrous mismanagement during COVID-19’s first year. The US, with 4 percent of the world’s population, suffered 14.5 percent of total COVID deaths …

[Emphasis added.]

Much of what Kennedy offers is rhetoric, not reality. He knows little about immunology, about viruses and their ability to adapt and spread. Unlike the doctors he so cruelly criticizes, he has not treated anyone. Yet he so easily dismisses their decades-long work helping to develop life-saving vaccines:

Dr. Fauci’s remedies are often more lethal than the diseases they pretend to treat. His COVID prescriptions were no exception. With his narrow focus on the solution of mass vaccination, Dr. Fauci never mentioned any of the many other costs associated with his policy directives. Anthony Fauci seems to have not considered that his unprecedented quarantine of the healthy would kill far more people than COVID, obliterate the global economy, plunge millions into poverty and bankruptcy, and grievously wound constitutional democracy globally. We have no way of knowing how many people died from isolation, unemployment, deferred medical care, depression, mental illness, obesity, stress, overdoses, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, and the accidents that so often accompany despair. We cannot dismiss the accusations that his lockdowns proved more deadly than the contagion.

[Emphasis added.]

Kennedy distorts the truth with the best of them:

Medicines were available against COVID—inexpensive, safe medicines—that would have prevented hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and saved as many lives if only we’d used them in this country. But Dr. Fauci and his Pharma collaborators deliberately suppressed those treatments in service to their single-minded objective—making America await salvation from their novel, multi-billion dollar vaccines. Americans’ native idealism will make them reluctant to believe that their government’s COVID policies were so grotesquely ill-conceived, so unfounded in science, so tethered to financial interests, that they caused hundreds of thousands of wholly unnecessary deaths. But, as you will see below, the evidence speaks for itself …

Peer-reviewed science offered anemic if any support for masking, quarantines, and social distancing, and Dr. Fauci offered no citations or justifications to support his diktats … Dr. Fauci was clearly aware that his mask decrees were contrary to overwhelming science. In July 2020, after switching course to recommend national mask mandates, Dr. Fauci told Norah O’Donnell with InStyle magazine that his earlier dismissal of mask efficacy was correct ‘in the context of the time in which I said it,’ and that he intended to prevent a consumer run on masks that might jeopardize their availability for front-line responders.

[Emphasis added.]

Let’s closely examine some of these falsehoods. Kennedy, like many antivaccination advocates, urged the use of ivermectin. As a result, there were several cases of people overdosing on the drug. Yes, ivermectin was often used to treat horses and cattle. It could be helpful as a topical treatment for lice and rosacea or as a tablet used for treating parasites, intestinal strongyloidiasis, and onchocerciasis. It was never shown to prevent COVID. And the Food and Drug Administration never “changed its position that currently available clinical trial data do not demonstrate that ivermectin is effective against COVID-19. The agency has not authorized or approved ivermectin for use in preventing or treating COVID-19.”

As for social distancing and masking, once again Kennedy gets the science wrong. He seems to overlook the basic fact that COVID-19 is an airborne virus—coughing, sneezing, even talking spreads the virus. Of course, providing space and a barrier to breathing in the virus makes all the sense in the world. One of the earliest studies from June 27, 2020, in the British Medical Journal The Lancet notes that physical distancing, face masks, and eye protection could result in a significant reduction in person-to-person transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19:

Ignoring the research, Kennedy opts for rhetoric, sensationalism, and ideology: “Dr. Fauci was clearly aware that his mask decrees were contrary to overwhelming science.” Fauci, in fact, was following the science. And because the Trump administration was totally unprepared to mount a truly coordinated national response to COVID-19, there was indeed legitimate concern that a consumer rush to purchase masks would quickly deplete the supply of N-95 masks needed by doctors, nurses, and hospital staff who were treating the ill. And if you go back and check, you will see that hospitals were indeed rationing the use of N-95 masks and unfortunately exposing their staff.

By February 10, 2021, with more data, Drs. John T. Brooks and Jay Butler wrote for the Journal of American Medicine:

Prior to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the efficacy of community mask wearing to reduce the spread of respiratory infections was controversial because there were no solid relevant data to support their use. During the pandemic, the scientific evidence has increased. Compelling data now demonstrate that community mask wearing is an effective nonpharmacologic intervention to reduce the spread of this infection, especially as source control to prevent spread from infected persons, but also as protection to reduce wearers’ exposure to infection.

But Kennedy, like Bondi, never seems to accept responsibility for his mistakes. One of the most damaging lies Kennedy and his cohorts continue to tell is that the COVID vaccine is more dangerous than the COVID virus itself. It was the COVID vaccine—and, yes, the mRNA COVID vaccine—that saved so many lives. And it was Kennedy and his coterie who convinced too many Americans to forego the life-saving vaccine. Here is a 2023 study in the European Journal of Epidemiology that makes this point:

This graph from the CDC reveals the stark contrast in the numbers of COVID cases and COVID deaths between those shown in black representing the unvaccinated and those in blue who have received the COVID vaccine. And there is an obvious decline in deaths as more and more people opted for the COVID vaccine.

With fact-based science, the more information you accumulate and the more you analyze the data, the more you learn and the more you know. The early data I have just shared about the clear difference in COVID cases and deaths between the unvaccinated and vaccinated was confirmed by a large-scale study just recently conducted in France and published in the Journal of American Medicine: “COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality Among Adults Aged 18 to 59 Years in France.” Dr. Eric Ding alerts us to its conclusion:

Kennedy’s bias against social distancing, masking, and vaccination makes him the worst person to be directing the Department of Health and Human Services at a time when we are facing a growing measles epidemic and the spread of bird flu.

While he so often criticizes others of corruption, Politifact reports that Kennedy has made a small fortune over the years working with Wismer Baum suing vaccine manufacturers, including helping them sue Merck for its problems with Gardasil, their vaccine for HPV: “In 2023, Kennedy earned $1,589,829 for his work at Wisner Baum, records show … Kennedy’s financial records show that in 2024, Wisner Baum paid Kennedy $856,559 for his consultant work.”

Ironically, the CDC, the agency Kennedy now oversees, concedes that:

HPV is a very common virus that can cause cancers later in life. About 13 million people, including teens, become infected with HPV each year. You can protect your child from these cancers with HPV vaccine … Gardasil-9 (9vHPV) is the vaccine distributed in the United States. This vaccine protects against nine HPV types (6, 11, 16, 18, 31, 33, 45, 52, and 58).

Besides legal work against vaccine manufacturers, Kennedy worked as chairman and Chief Legal Counsel for Children’s Health Defense, the antivaxx organization he founded. Politifact continues, “He earned $326,056 in salary and benefits from the antivaccine group for three months of work in 2023 before taking an unpaid leave of absence April 1, 2023.” I’d be surprised if Fauci ever earned $100,000 a month.

In addition, Politifact points to his multiple inaccurate claims about vaccinations over the years:

Kennedy steadfastly maintained:

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Vaccines cause autism.No childhood vaccines ‘have ever been tested in a safety study pre-licensing.’There is ‘tremendous circumstantial evidence’ that psychiatric drugs cause mass shootings, and the National Institutes of Health refuses to research the link out of deference to pharmaceutical companies.Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were discredited as COVID-19 treatments so COVID-19 vaccines could be granted emergency use authorization, a win for Big Pharma.Exposure to the pesticide atrazine contributes to gender dysphoria in children.COVID-19 is ‘targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.’

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I think the appropriate term here might be “projection.” RFK Jr. has also leveled the greed charge against pediatricians who advise parents to immunize their children against childhood diseases. Here is some of what he said on Tucker Carlson’s podcast:

And so the doctors also have their own incentives. You know, perverse incentives. There’s a published article out there now that says that 50% of revenues to most pediatricians come from vaccines. And then there’s a whole structure where Blue Cross and the other insurance companies pay bonuses to the pediatrician to make sure if, for example, 95% of their clients are fully vaccinated, they get a huge bonus. It could be tens of thousands of dollars.

And that’s why your pediatrician, if you say, I want to go slow on the vaccines or I want to have a little different schedule, your pediatrician will throw you out of his practice because you’re now jeopardizing that bonus structure. And these are all perverse incentives that stop doctors from actually practicing medicine and caring for the client. Because they’re looking at the bottom line … It’s just the incentive system that everybody makes money. Insurance companies make money if you’re sick. Ironically, they make more money if the population is sick …

[Emphasis added.]

Just last August, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted a video on X claiming doctors were being paid to vaccinate rather than evaluate:

This is what he said:

Hi I’m Robert F. Kennedy Jr. your HHS Secretary. Let me ask you something. Should doctors make decisions based on what’s best for their patients or based on what makes them the most money? It’s not a tough question. But we’ve inherited a health care system that constantly pushes doctors towards the later. It rewards certain treatments not because they’re better for the patient but because someone profits. Take what happened during COVID. Hospitals were paid to report staff vaccination rates. Those numbers were fed into the national healthcare safety network then published on the CDC website to shame any hospital that refused to become an enforcer of federal vaccine mandates. Today I’m proud to announce we’ve eliminated that policy by repealing a dangerous Biden-era provision in the CMS In-patient payment rule. We’re not stopping there. We’re scanning every corner of the healthcare system for hidden incentives that corrupt medical judgment. What we’re finding is alarming. Doctors are being paid to vaccinate not to evaluate. They’re pressured to follow the money not the science … Doctors should be guided by medical judgment and their hippocratic oath not by financial incentives or government mandates …

Here is fact-checking group Poynter’s independent analysis of this issue:

Poynter points out:

Dr. Christoph Diasio, a pediatrician at Sandhills Pediatrics in North Carolina, said the argument that doctors profit off of vaccines is counterintuitive. ‘If it was really about all the money, it would be better for kids to be sick so you’d see more sick children and get to take care of more sick children, right?’ he said … It costs money to stock, store and administer a vaccine. Pediatricians sometimes store thousands of dollars worth of vaccines in specialized medical-grade refrigeration units, which can be expensive. They pay to insure vaccines in case anything happens to them … They also pay nursing staff to administer vaccines.

‘Vaccines are hugely expensive,’ said Dr. Jesse Hackell, a retired general pediatrician and chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ committee on pediatric workforce. ‘We lay out a lot of money up front.’ When a child with private insurance gets a vaccine, the pediatrician is paid for the vaccine product and for its administration, Hackell said. ‘Many pediatricians also participate in a federal program that provides vaccines for free to eligible children whose parents can’t afford them. Participating in that program isn’t profitable because even though they get the vaccines for free, pediatricians store and insure them, and Medicaid reimbursements often don’t cover the costs. But many choose to participate and provide those vaccines anyway because it’s valuable for patients,’ Hackell said.

Here is how Vaccinate Your Family puts it:

[W]hat many people don’t realize is that vaccines are the second highest expense for a pediatric practice after employees …

*But why are vaccines such a large expense for the pediatrician? *

Well, vaccines vary in cost (in one study between $4 and $30 per dose) and that figure can vary depending on the circumstances … How many years of research went into the vaccine? How much did it cost to develop? And how much money was spent on the various stages of clinical trials before the vaccine receives FDA approval for use? … Pharmaceutical companies spend years developing and testing the vaccines they produce to ensure they are as safe and efficacious as possible. Not to mention there is a large investment that goes into the development of a new vaccine without any assurance that the vaccine will be ultimately approved or even recommended … And if a pediatrician wants to offer immunizations, she has to do her part too and buy them. Before she can give them. Cash upfront.

I meant it when I said quackery kills. COVID kills. Measles kills. Influenza kills. Unfortunately, Kennedy’s hostility to life-saving mRNA technology has been transformed from opinion to policy:

As The Washington Post reports:

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Tuesday a crackdown on mRNA vaccine technology and research to develop it, following months of pressure from anti-vaccine activists. According to HHS, the Trump administration has launched ‘a coordinated wind-down’ of 22 mRNA projects … The contracts will either be canceled or altered, according to HHS, including projects focused on creating an H5N1 bird flu vaccine and developing respiratory virus therapeutics …

Traditional vaccines deliver viral proteins or weakened versions of a virus to teach the immune system how to fight it. In contrast, mRNA vaccines work by delivering instructions to the body’s cells on how to manufacture viral proteins. They are faster to develop than traditional vaccines, which public health experts say make them a valuable tool in fighting emerging pathogens or the next pandemic.

The Trump administration has denigrated mRNA vaccines as a dangerous technology, but large-scale studies have established that they are safe and effective … Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota infectious-disease expert, called the targeting of mRNA ‘dangerous” and ‘shortsighted … It was the great hope that we would have a much better prepared world for an influenza pandemic, should it occur, because we could quickly ramp up mRNA technology,’ said Osterholm … Federal officials also terminated a contract to Emory University that was intended to develop an inhaled mRNA covid and influenza therapy.

There has recently been a lot of controversy about Moderna’s attempt to license a new mRNA influenza vaccine. As The New York Times reported on February 1, 2026:

The vaccine maker Moderna said on Tuesday that the Food and Drug Administration had notified the company that the agency would not review its mRNA flu vaccine, the latest sign of federal health policy that has become hostile to vaccine development.

Dr. Vinay Prasad, the agency’s top vaccine regulator, rejected the company’s application for approval over a concern that Moderna’s clinical trial had compared its experimental vaccine against a product the agency did not consider the best on the market. People in the comparison group received Fluarix Quadrivalent, a flu vaccine sold by GSK. Moderna had spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars testing its flu vaccine, enrolling 41,000 people and aimed at a market of adults ages 50 and older. The company concluded that its shot was superior to GSK’s product.

[Emphasis added.]

Public outcry from public health advocates and Moderna’s willingness to conduct additional trials on people over 65 influenced the FDA to reverse its decision and agree to review the application. I often turn to the terrific work of Katelina Jetelina of Your Local Epidemiologist to better understand these issues. Here is some of what Jetelina and Hannah Totte wrote about Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine:

Flu vaccines help, but they’re far from perfect. In most years, they reduce the risk of hospitalization by roughly 40–60%. (To compare, the measles vaccine’s 97% effectiveness against severe disease). Flu changes quickly, which means innovative vaccines are needed.

*There are two potential advantages of mRNA technology: *

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Speed:mRNA vaccines can be updated much faster than traditional flu vaccines (3 months vs. 6 months), so they could catch up to flu mutations more quickly.Immune response:Early research suggested stronger immune responses, including T cell and memory B cell responses that were comparable to or stronger than those from enhanced flu vaccines used in older adults.

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*So, Moderna invested an estimated $500–700 million to develop a new mRNA flu vaccine candidate, called mRNA-1010, and tested it in a Phase 3 trial involving more than 40,000 adults age 50 and older. The study compared the mRNA vaccine with a standard licensed flu shot. *

Results showed 26% better protection in adults over 50 with the mRNA flu vaccine than with standard flu shots, a meaningful gain. Side effects such as fatigue and chills were more common (as they are with mRNA Covid-19 vaccines).

How many times did Donald Trump and his supplicants insist he deserved his own Nobel Prize? Well, in case you have been napping, he has not won it. But you know who has? The two folks who discovered and perfected the life-saving mRNA technology:

The Nobel Committee declared:

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has today decided to award the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. The discoveries by the two Nobel Laureates were critical for developing effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 during the pandemic that began in early 2020. Through their groundbreaking findings, which have fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system, the laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.

[Emphasis added.]

Meanwhile, Kennedy has dismantled the National Institute of Health and replaced the highly experienced clinicians and researchers of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) with antivaxx ideologues. His continuing attacks on mRNA research and vaccine hesitancy will undoubtedly result in unnecessary death. Most recently, his arrogant endorsement of remedies that just do not work has created confusion as the measles epidemic expands across the country.

So let’s head back to Katelina Jetelina for this update about influenza and measles cases in the United States:

Clearly, vaccine hesitancy and the confusion about how best to prevent the spread of measles has undermined decades of progress. And the Kennedy-led coalition of the ideologues have managed to make things worse. Remember Dr. Jay Bhattarcharya? Sponsor of the let-the-COVID-virus-spread and the Great Barrington Declaration. Dr. Bhattarcharya, thanks to RFK Jr., became the head of the National Institute of Health and then oversaw the cancellation of millions of dollars of NIH grants and the drastic reduction in staff. Some of the grants he cancelled were specifically designed to find strategies to overcome growing vaccine hesitancy.

Well, in the early days of COVID, Bhattarcharya was asked by Newsmax whether he thought it was medically ethical to mandate children and teens to get the virus.

‘I believe it is unethical to do so,’ Bhattacharya responded. ‘They are, as you say, Steve, at very low risk for bad outcomes from this virus. Very few healthy, young children died from this virus, more died from the flu last year.’ Minimal benefits are gained by young persons getting the vaccine, according to Bhattacharya, and side effects such as the few cases of myocarditis in teenage boys are not worth the limited benefits.

But like his boss, Dr. Bhattarcharya got it wrong. This January 31, 2023, report from the BBC reveals how vulnerable young people really were to COVID and the price they paid:

The BBC wrote:

COVID-19 was the underlying cause of death for more than 940,000 people in the US, including over 1,300 deaths among children and young people aged 0–19 years. Until now, it had been unclear how the burden of deaths from COVID-19 compared with other leading causes of deaths in this age group. The researchers investigated this using data from US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention databases for the period 1 August 2021 to 31 July 2022 …

Among children and young people aged 0 – 19 years in the US, COVID-19 ranked eighth among all causes of death; fifth among all disease-related causes of death; and first in deaths caused by infectious or respiratory diseases. By age group, COVID-19 ranked seventh (infants), seventh (1–4 year olds), sixth (5–9 year olds), sixth (10–14 year olds), and fifth (15–19 year olds).

COVID-19 was the underlying cause for 2% of deaths in children and young people (800 out of 43,000), with an overall death rate of 1.0 per 100,000 of the population aged 0–19. The leading cause of death (perinatal conditions) had an overall death rate of 12.7 per 100,000; COVID-19 ranked ahead of influenza and pneumonia, which together had a death rate of 0.6 per 100,000.” How many would have survived had they been vaccinated?

[Emphasis added.]

Here is Jess Steier, a public health doctor, of the podcast “Unbiased Science” on why vaccination is so important. Of the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine (MMR), she wrote:

And it’s not just about measles. MMR coverage for kindergartners has fallen from 95.2% during the 2019-2020 school year to 92.5% in 2024-2025 (which is below the threshold needed to provide herd immunity). Pertussis (whooping cough) saw major outbreaks in 2025 and continues to circulate. Polio has resurfaced in wastewater in multiple states. These are all vintage diseases we’d gotten so good at controlling that most parents (and even some physicians!) had never even seen a case. That’s changing.

For a virus as contagious as measles (the most infectious disease we are aware of), which can infect up to 9 out of 10 unvaccinated people who are exposed — even small drops in coverage change the landscape fast. At 95% coverage, there’s very little virus circulating. Your vaccinated child rarely encounters measles at all. Below that threshold, the virus finds gaps. It moves. It circulates longer and reaches more people. And every encounter is another roll of the dice for everyone, including the vaccinated … About 3 out of every 100 fully vaccinated people who are exposed to measles can still get infected. That’s called a breakthrough infection. In an environment where measles is rare, this almost never happens because you’re almost never exposed. In an environment where measles is everywhere, that 3% starts to matter more — not because the vaccine got worse, but because the opportunities for exposure skyrocketed …

Measles doesn’t just make you sick. It can wipe out your immune system’s memory of other diseases you’ve already fought off or been vaccinated against. This is called immune amnesia. A 2019 study published in Science looked at unvaccinated children who got measles and found that afterward, they’d lost, on average, about 20% of their existing antibody repertoire. Some kids lost more than 70% of their protection against viruses they’d previously been immune to.

And this happens to virtually everyone who gets measles, even mild cases. Sit with that for a second. Your child catches the flu at age 3, fights it off, builds immunity. Gets a cold, fights that off too. Over the years, their immune system builds up this whole library of memory from every infection they’ve encountered. Then measles rolls through and just … wipes it, burns down the library. All that hard-won protection against flu, against other infections they’d already beaten, are degraded or gone. And it can take two to three years for the immune system to rebuild. Before the measles vaccine existed, measles infections could be linked to up to half of all childhood deaths from infectious diseases — not from measles itself, but from the immune destruction it left behind. The MMR vaccine prevents this. Not just measles — it prevents the immune amnesia that measles causes.

Just a few days ago, we learned that in addition to his duties as head of NIH, Donald Trump appointed Dr. Bhattarcharya to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Given the fact that vaccination rates are declining and the cases of measles are increasing, this is not the man I would pick to either prevent or control disease. Because as we have seen with COVID, quackery kills.