In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio. A top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.
Lauren Weber, Caitlin Gilbert, Dylan Moriarty and Joshua Lott at WP:
The share of U.S. counties where 95 percent or more of kindergartners were vaccinated against measles — the number doctors say is needed to achieve overall protection for the class, known as “herd immunity” — has dropped from 50 percent before the pandemic to 28 percent, according to The Post’s examination of the public records from 44 states and the District of Columbia.
Most of the counties that previously lacked herd immunity for kindergarten classrooms got worse, according to the Post analysis, which in most cases compared the academic years 2018-2019 and 2024-2025.
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The Post’s findings show that at least 5.2 million kindergarten-age children in the U.S. are living in counties where vaccination rates for classrooms have fallen below the herd immunity threshold — up from about 3.5 million before the pandemic. While the vast majority of those who receive the measles vaccine are protected from severe illness and death, without herd immunity measles can still spread among those not immune, including those who cannot be vaccinated because of age or because they are immunocompromised.
Out of the 44 states reporting county-level rates, 36 and the District of Columbia also reported them for individual schools or districts. At least 19,000 schools — nearly half of schools in the Post analysis — were more vulnerable to outbreaks.
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Medical specialists and public health experts expect more children will be left unprotected given policies advanced by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist
who is rolling back government vaccine policies and recommendations
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The national anti-vaccine organization that Kennedy founded, Children’s Health Defense, has linked vaccines to autism, an assertion not supported by evidence and which scientists say is false.
