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.
Since Trump took office in 2025, the U.S. has recorded more confirmed measles cases than in the previous 20 years combined.
Antivaxxers downplay the human and economic costs of measles.
Lena H. Sun and Rachel Roubein at WP:Two Pennsylvania residents have died after contracting measles, the first such deaths in the state in 35 years and the first reported in the United States this year. The deaths prompted Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) to sharply confront the nation’s health secretary over federal vaccine messaging that he said is confusing and harmful.
Both the people who died were residents of Lancaster County. The Pennsylvania Health Department declined to release their ages or other information, citing the privacy of the people and their families.
Pennsylvania has confirmed 393 measles cases in 28 counties this year, including 86 in the past week. Nearly half of the cases are in Lancaster County, authorities said. Seventy people, nearly 20 percent of those infected, have been hospitalized, Shapiro said, and every confirmed case has occurred in someone who was not fully vaccinated.
“We hope and we pray that those deaths will be the last,” Shapiro said at a news conference Tuesday.
Shapiro, widely seen as a presidential contender, said he was late to the news conference because he had been speaking by phone with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“I was very, very blunt with him,” the governor said. “Made very clear that his actions and the rhetoric that’s coming from this administration are having a negative impact on communities across America, particularly right here in Pennsylvania.”
Shapiro said Kennedy’s statements were confusing parents and making it harder for them to know whom to trust. “There’s real-life consequences to spreading misinformation. There’s real-life consequences to scaring people and not relying on actual doctors, actual medical professionals, to provide unbiased information to parents so that we can make reasonable decisions for our kids,” he said.
The federal government’s public health decisions are not driven by facts and science, Shapiro said. That makes it even more confusing for parents. “All we want to do as parents is what is right for our kids,” he said.
