[intermerda]

And yet, the parent of one such child who died of measles because of being unvaccinated went on video for Children’s Health Defense (RFK's anti-vaccine group) to claim how vaccines are bad and measles are good.

The claim that these the religious fundamentalist groups have nothing to do with anti-vaccine propaganda inflicted by MAHA types is disingenuous or simply poorly informed.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/anti-vaccine-infl...

[pclmulqdq]

Please go ahead and find me a transmission chain of any of these nearly eradicated infectious diseases that went through someone involved in MAHA or Children's Health Defense. If you go looking, you will find that every single outbreak of Measles, Polio, or any similar disease in North America goes through a fundamentalist religious community. The Wakefield/RFK groups are really not large or tightly-connected enough to do this.

What you can blame RFK for (and what you should blame him for) is cutting funding to identify these possible transmission events and intercept them. This is an area where the Trump admin made severe cuts, on the back of RFK's ideological bent against the concept of infectious disease and the "government efficiency" wave. As a result, responses to outbreaks in these religious communities are much, much slower. It is not a "MAHA wave" that is causing outbreaks like this, it's the loss of funding.

[hombre_fatal]

RFKjr and the 2019 Samoa measles outbreak comes to mind where he went to Samoa to boost vaccine hesitancy after some kids died due to a mistakenly adulterated vaccination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Samoa_measles_outbreak

This kind of messaging is why Samoa had 30% vaccination rate while nearby islands had 99% vaccination when measles infected the island later that same year.

I don’t see how you can dismiss RFKjr’s messaging. Are you claiming he has no impact on public opinion?

[pclmulqdq]

Sorry, can you point to where Samoa is on a map of North America?

The messaging gets a few thousand kooks riled up, and it's been going back decades to the Wakefield study and all the random kooks who think their child got autism from a vaccine. RFK is not new. His message is marginally more popular in the US, but it is not causing a huge wave of vaccine hesitancy.

Places like Samoa have additional problems with vaccination in that the standard of care isn't that high and sometimes those errors cause people to avoid care. In the Samoa case you cited there, the inciting incident involved two kids dying due to a nurse's error which wasn't investigated. If getting a vaccine involves some risk of getting poisoned by an incompetent nurse, you might also think twice about getting a vaccine. This is very different than the RFK situation of yelling about things that don't happen (vaccines causing autism, birth defects, etc.).