The left is doing it again: refusing to take any responsibility for problems their own policies helped create.
We now have two measles-associated deaths in Pennsylvania, and before we even know what role measles actually played in either death, politicians are already frantically trying to turn them into a political weapon.
One of the biggest reasons childhood vaccination schedules work is that schools require the shots for enrollment. That system keeps parents on schedule. Then we shut schools down for extended periods during COVID, disrupted routine pediatric care, disrupted school-enrollment enforcement, and created a huge cohort of kids who fell behind on routine vaccinations.
A completely predictable consequence of those idiotic school closings was going to be more outbreaks of diseases we had previously kept under control.
At the same time, we created massive vaccine hesitancy during the COVID vaccine era. And the reason is not difficult to understand: public-health officials and politicians made claims about the COVID shots that turned out not to be true, especially about transmission and what vaccination would accomplish.
Then they treated skepticism about a new vaccine developed for a novel virus as though it were equivalent to rejecting the decades of evidence behind vaccines like polio and measles.
That damaged public trust. And now the same people who helped destroy that trust want to pretend they had absolutely nothing to do with the consequences.
So now we have these two deaths.
And at this point, we know very little.
They occurred in Lancaster County, home to the largest Amish population in America and a region already known to contain communities with substantially lower vaccination rates. That does not prove either person was Amish. It does mean this outbreak did not occur in some randomly selected, fully vaccinated American population. It occurred in a region we already knew was unusually vulnerable to measles outbreaks.
One of the deaths was a newborn. The immediate cause was a lacerated/ruptured spleen. Whether measles caused or contributed to that injury is exactly the question that has not been established publicly. There are multiple possible causes of splenic injury in a newborn, and so far I have found politicians eager to blame measles before I have found the doctors who actually examined the child saying measles caused the death.
Maybe further investigation will show that it did. Fine. Then say that when the evidence exists.
But right now we have politicians taking “measles-associated deaths” and selling them to the public as “people died from measles” before the underlying medical facts have even been established.
And somehow the people who shut down the schools, disrupted childhood vaccination schedules, destroyed public confidence in vaccination through their handling of COVID, and then blurred the distinction between a new COVID shot and long-established vaccines like MMR are once again insisting that everyone else is responsible for the mess they helped create
We now have two measles-associated deaths in Pennsylvania, and before we even know what role measles actually played in either death, politicians are already frantically trying to turn them into a political weapon.
One of the biggest reasons childhood vaccination schedules work is that schools require the shots for enrollment. That system keeps parents on schedule. Then we shut schools down for extended periods during COVID, disrupted routine pediatric care, disrupted school-enrollment enforcement, and created a huge cohort of kids who fell behind on routine vaccinations.
A completely predictable consequence of those idiotic school closings was going to be more outbreaks of diseases we had previously kept under control.
At the same time, we created massive vaccine hesitancy during the COVID vaccine era. And the reason is not difficult to understand: public-health officials and politicians made claims about the COVID shots that turned out not to be true, especially about transmission and what vaccination would accomplish.
Then they treated skepticism about a new vaccine developed for a novel virus as though it were equivalent to rejecting the decades of evidence behind vaccines like polio and measles.
That damaged public trust. And now the same people who helped destroy that trust want to pretend they had absolutely nothing to do with the consequences.
So now we have these two deaths.
And at this point, we know very little.
They occurred in Lancaster County, home to the largest Amish population in America and a region already known to contain communities with substantially lower vaccination rates. That does not prove either person was Amish. It does mean this outbreak did not occur in some randomly selected, fully vaccinated American population. It occurred in a region we already knew was unusually vulnerable to measles outbreaks.
One of the deaths was a newborn. The immediate cause was a lacerated/ruptured spleen. Whether measles caused or contributed to that injury is exactly the question that has not been established publicly. There are multiple possible causes of splenic injury in a newborn, and so far I have found politicians eager to blame measles before I have found the doctors who actually examined the child saying measles caused the death.
Maybe further investigation will show that it did. Fine. Then say that when the evidence exists.
But right now we have politicians taking “measles-associated deaths” and selling them to the public as “people died from measles” before the underlying medical facts have even been established.
And somehow the people who shut down the schools, disrupted childhood vaccination schedules, destroyed public confidence in vaccination through their handling of COVID, and then blurred the distinction between a new COVID shot and long-established vaccines like MMR are once again insisting that everyone else is responsible for the mess they helped create
