Saturday, a second child died of measles this year, a little more than a month after the first death of a child of measles in two decades had been reported. This brings the total number of measles fatalities so far this year to three, and it’s only early April. Details are thus far scarce, but according to the New York Times:
The measles crisis in West Texas has claimed the life of another child, the second death in an outbreak that has burned through the region and infected dozens of residents in bordering states.
The 8-year-old girl died early Thursday morning of “measles pulmonary failure” at a hospital in Lubbock, Texas, according to records obtained by The New York Times. It is the second confirmed measles death in a decade in the United States.
The first was an unvaccinated child who died in West Texas in February. Another unvaccinated person died in New Mexico after testing positive for measles, though officials have not yet confirmed that measles was the cause of death.
A Trump administration official said on Saturday night that the girl’s cause of death is “still being looked at.”
This measles outbreak, which is the largest, and other outbreaks in other states are clearly associated with low vaccine uptake. I hate to have to repeat this again, but measles is one of the most transmissible respiratory viruses, and maintaining herd immunity/community immunity requires a high level of vaccine uptake in a population, at least 90-95%. As for this case, from what we know thus far, it sure sounds a lot like the first tragic measles death, in which the child developed a superimposed bacterial pneumonia to which she succumbed. As you might know, one of the ways that people die from viral respiratory diseases is that the virus weakens the lungs’ defenses sufficiently that a bacterial pneumonia can gain hold. This is true for influenza, it’s true for COVID-19, and it’s true for measles. Meanwhile, it’s being reported that, as of now (early April), the US has seen twice as many measles cases as it did in all of 2024:
Texas’ outbreak began more than two months ago. State health officials said Friday there were 59 new cases of measles since Tuesday, bringing the total to 481 across 19 counties — most of them in West Texas. The state also logged 14 new hospitalizations, for a total of 56 throughout the outbreak.
More than 65% of Texas’ cases are in Gaines County, population 22,892, where the virus stated spreading in a close-knit, undervaccinated Mennonite community. The county now has logged 315 cases since late January — just over 1% of the county’s residents.
New Mexico announced six new cases Friday, bringing the state’s total to 54. New Mexico health officials say the cases are linked to Texas’ outbreak based on genetic testing. Most are in Lea County, where two people have been hospitalized, and two are in Eddy County.
Elsewhere, there have been smaller outbreaks in New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, Ohio, and New Jersey, and the numbers cited above are likely significant underestimates of the true number of cases, given that many parents are not getting their children tested.
A few weeks ago, I wrote what to me was a frightening and difficult-to-contemplate post in which I made some predictions about how our new Secretary of Health and Human Services, longtime antivax activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., might go about dismantling federal vaccination and public health programs. It turns out that my imagination wasn’t expansive enough, as he’s come up with ways that I hadn’t thought of, such as eliminating grant funding for studies of vaccine hesitancy, COVID-19 vaccines, and COVID-19 itself. While this current outbreak cannot be attributed to RFK Jr.’s policies given that he hadn’t been confirmed as HHS Secretary yet when it began, I agree with Dr. Paul Offit that, thus far, RFK Jr.’s response has been abysmal. On the other hand, the declining uptake of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and other vaccines driven by the distrust of vaccines stoked by the antivaccine movement, of which RFK Jr. has been the most prominent American voice since 2005, can be laid right at RFK Jr.’s doorstep. Before he became HHS Secretary, he was a major influential figure in the antivax movement and worked tirelessly to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about vaccines.
This time around, RFK Jr. planned to attend the funeral of the child who died which was scheduled as of this writing for Sunday, perhaps in response to the widespread criticism that he received for his reaction to the first pediatric measles death and frustration from the Trump Administration that he has not been more proactive in messaging around the outbreaks. When I heard about this, I was immediately with Dr. Offit when he wrote:
When RFK Jr. attends the funeral of yet another child who has died from measles unnecessarily, he should apologize to the family. Apologize for his inaction. Apologize for his continual spread of misinformation about the disease and the vaccine. Apologize for his failure to strongly support the importance of vaccinating children during an epidemic. And apologize for cutting funds for immunization clinics in areas with low vaccination rates. The frankly dismissive mantra of “thoughts and prayers” doesn’t cut it here.
Did RFK Jr. do any of this? Spoiler alert: No, he did not. What he did was similar to what he did the last time a child died. Actually, what he did is more defined by what he didn’t do rather than what he did, as you will see.
“Make America Healthy Again”: “Soft eugenics” and social Darwinism
RFK Jr.’s history of antivaccine activism is well known and has been well documented, both here on this blog and over at my not-so-super-secret other blog. I mentioned “soft eugenics” in the title of this post. Before I proceed to explain, I have to give a hat tip to Derek Beres and Matt Remski at the Conspirituality Podcast, specifically the March 8 episode, MAHA’s Soft Eugenics. The reason that I feel obligated to mention them is because, although I’ve long called, for example, the Great Barrington Declaration a “eugenicist” document and referred to the eugenics-adjacent tendencies of the antivaccine movement, I had been a bit troubled, a bit concerned that perhaps I was overstating my case. Eugenics, after all, implies the active removal of those thought to be inferior, either through sterilization or outright killing, and, say what you will about RFK Jr. and the antivaccine movement, it’s difficult to accuse them of actively doing that. What the antivaccine movement does—and has always done—is basically “let nature take its course”; i.e., let nature do the culling. The child who survives was “fit,” and the child who doesn’t wasn’t. That’s why I like the term “soft eugenics,” which was defined in the episode thusly:
To be very clear, I don’t think Kennedy or any of the wellness influencers I’ve criticized are eugenicists in terms of advocating for the death of a group of people or even suggesting fetuses with genetic problems should be killed. That’s not what we’re discussing here. That type of language predominantly remains over on the fringes of ethno-nationalism.
But it very much fits the bill of soft eugenics, which is more of a shrug and sigh than a battle cry. We’ve been hearing this type of rhetoric from anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers since COVID. But to be honest, it pervaded wellness speak for generations.
When you hear an influencer claim that someone died with COVID, which is a thoroughly debunked idea, instead of saying they died from COVID, you’re hearing soft eugenics. When you hear someone, as I pointed out on Thursday’s episode, talk about only malnourished children dying of measles and healthy children have nothing to worry about. I mean, it’s an immunological rite of passage.
Of course, when the first child died of measles a month ago, I noted that all the old measles tropes had come back (they had never really ever gone away, in fact), in particular the claim that measles is a benign childhood illness that rarely causes significant injury, disability, or death.
With that passage, it all crystallized in my head. I had heard a term that accurately describes the antivaccine movement. Instead of an active removal of the “unfit” from the gene pool, “soft eugenics” is more of a shrug, followed by an attitude of “let nature take its course.” The idea, of course, is that the “fit” will easily survive the challenge—in this case, measles—and it’s only if you’re “unfit” somehow that you have anything to worry about. What also caused the lightbulb to go on in my head was the realization that there is a real point here. It wasn’t just the antivaccine movement. It is huge swaths of MAHA, which is derived from older, more general quackery. Thinking about “soft eugenics” in the context of MAHA and the antivax movement led me to realize, however, that MAHA is not just soft eugenics. After all, eugenics implies removing from the gene pool, which fits the antivaccine movement and many of the ideas promoted by “wellness” influencers if you’re talking about children who have not yet reached reproductive age, but what about adults or the elderly?
It turns out that very similar ideas were behind the Great Barrington Declaration, a document published by Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and our new NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya that basically advocated a “let ‘er rip” approach to COVID-19 in order to achieve “natural herd immunity.” But what about those at high risk for hospitalization, complications, and death from COVID-19? The authors of the GBD advocated for them “focused protection.” Unfortunately, this was never really well defined; it was basically an afterthought. The overall document was at the very least social Darwinist, its central idea being that the “young and healthy” will be fine if they get COVID-19 and therefore shouldn’t be expected to alter their lifestyle and participate in “lockdowns” in order to protect the vulnerable.
See where the social Darwinism comes in? Admittedly, I’m not a historian (although I do know a hell of a lot about World War II and Nazi Germany, given an interest in WWII that dates back to junior high) nor am I an expert in these topics, but I know enough to know that eugenics is related to social Darwinism, and vice-versa. Eugenics tends to be more about actively trying to “improve the gene pool” by decreasing the fertility of people who are considered “inferior” and/or promoting childbearing among people considered “superior.” Social Darwinism can encourage such negative and positive eugenics, but doesn’t have to. It is more like the “soft eugenics” in that it posits a worldview in which the “strong” or the “fit” should have higher social status and the “weak” or the “unfit” should be subservient or allowed to die. In a more individualistic, laissez-faire societies (e.g., the US), the individual tends to be the unit of selection, while in more nationalist movements it is the race or ethnic groups (e.g., Nazi Germany). Social Darwinism tends to justify socioeconomic differences as being a product of the “strong” rising and the “weak” being left behind, considering this to be “nature.” You can see how an attitude of “let nature take its course” and “if he dies, he dies” can be compatible with this worldview.
In any event, call it what you want, “soft eugenics” or social Darwinism, what the antivaccine movement basically promotes is a deceptive appeal to nature, in which immunity from “natural infection” is always superior to “artificial” immunity from vaccines (never mind that the same immunologic mechanisms are at work) and infectious disease is nothing to worry about if you are “fit” and have a “healthy immune system.” In that latter case, you will suffer briefly, but come out fine on the other side, with all-powerful superior “natural immunity” to the disease. When last I wrote about measles tropes, I pointed out how desperately antivaxxers work to portray measles as a “harmless” disease, to the point where they like to refer to an old episode of The Brady Bunch in which the kids all caught measles or episodes of The Flintstones or The Donna Reed Show in which measles is played for laughs as evidence that, before the measles vaccine arrived six decades ago, people didn’t view measles as much of a threat or big deal, contrary to today of course.
After the first measles death, RFK Jr. himself, under the guise of supposedly recommending that parents get their children vaccinated with MMR, promoted such tropes, as I detailed. Read the post for the details, but examples included emphasizing vaccination as a personal choice, saying that children died “with measles” instead of “of measles,” doing his best to downplay the risk of measles, and recommending vitamin A to treat measles, when the only evidence that it helps comes from children in underdeveloped countries, where the prevalence of nutritional deficiencies, including. Vitamin A, is high. (Unsurprisingly, there have been cases of Vitamin A toxicity among the children of antivax parents seeking to prevent or treat measles with it.)
As Beres put it:
And if someone dies from natural infection, I’m gonna find a reason why they couldn’t possibly be healthy in the first place, instead of recognizing that measles is a vicious disease that can cause a lot of chronic disease, blindness, and at the extreme, kill people, mostly young children. Like I said, a sigh, but a rather pernicious one.
Indeed. Let’s take a look at an example, namely the first child to die. I expect that it won’t be long before the second child and her parents are subject to the same treatment.
How antivaxxers and MAHA react to deaths from measles
It represents a challenge for antivax messaging whenever a child dies of a vaccine-preventable disease like measles, and antivaxxers know it. As a result, as soon as the news was announced, a number of the usual antivax suspects started promoting familiar narratives. For example, some said that the child died “with measles,” not “of measles,” because she had apparently died of a superimposed bacterial pneumonia. A variant of that was that the child never had measles at all, as Mike Adams tried to claim:
The recent media frenzy over a supposed measles outbreak has been met with skepticism by health freedom advocates. Mike Adams, founder of Brighteon and host of Brighteon Broadcast News, has called the panic a “total hoax.” He highlights a recent case in Texas where a child reportedly died “with measles,” not “from measles.”
“The child died in a hospital, and the cause of death was likely something else entirely,” Adams explains. “They probably used a PCR test to claim the child had measles, but that doesn’t mean measles was the cause of death. This is fearmongering at its worst.”
Sound familiar? Brian Hooker, a chemical engineer turned incompetent antivax “epidemiologist” (and the chief scientific officer of RFK Jr.’s old antivax group Children’s Health Defense) opined:
Hooker said the lack of useful information about the current measles outbreak in Gaines County, Texas, has been “extremely frustrating.” The West Texas county has been home to a Mennonite community since 1977, according to the Seminole Chamber of Commerce.
“People typically don’t just die from measles,” Hooker said. “We know it was a child in the Lubbock, Texas, hospital — that’s it. No idea of comorbidities, complications, course of disease, nothing.”
Notice the obvious underlying assumption that children don’t die of measles unless they are somehow unfit less than healthy to begin with. Of course, if a child actually does have a medical condition that predisposes them to severe complications or death from measles, that’s actually all the more reason to get that child vaccinated!
Unsurprisingly, Del Bigtree also jumped on the bandwagon, interviewing mothers of unvaccinated children who had contracted the measles and recovered, all of them standing by their decision not to vaccinate using similar sorts of assumptions, such as “natural immunity” being better, the vaccine being “unnatural” or otherwise somehow inferior, and the disease itself not being that serious. Of course, he featured a quack who claims to be able to treat measles with budesonide, an inhaled steroid that COVID-19 contrarians had touted as a highly effective treatment for severe COVID-19, just showing how not only is everything old new again but lots of new things are being repurposed for the old, as in unproven COVID-19 treatments being applied to the new measles outbreak.
CHD, for its part, decided to exploit the grieving parents of the girl who died, neither of whom regretted not vaccinating, despite holding back sobs as they described how their girl had gotten sick from measles, developed pneumonia, and then ended up on a ventilator in a hospital, where she eventually died. From a local news report:
The couple, members of a Mennonite community in Gaines County with traditionally low vaccination rates, spoke on camera in both English and Low German to CHD Executive Director Polly Tommey and CHD Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker.
“It was her time on Earth,” the translator said the parents told her. “They believe she’s better off where she is now.”
“We would absolutely not take the MMR,” the mother said in English, referring to the measles-mumps-rubella vaccination children typically receive before attending school. She said her stance on vaccination has not changed after her daughter’s death.
“The measles wasn’t that bad. They got over it pretty quickly,” the mother said of her other four surviving children who were treated with castor oil and inhaled steroids and recovered.
The couple told CHD that their daughter had measles for days when she became tired and the girl’s labored breathing prompted the couple to take her to Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock. There, the girl was intubated and died a few days later. The other children came down with measles after their sister died.
The parents also noted about their other children, “The measles wasn’t that bad. They got over it pretty quickly.”
I watched as much of the actual video as I could stand, given the ghoulishness of Brian Hooker and Andrew Wakefield’s old antivax friend Polly Tommey. Even though Tommey oozes sympathy for the parents, her questions indicate that she was looking for a reason to dismiss measles as the cause of this poor girl’s death. More disturbing, the parents are still antivaccine and attribute their daughter’s death to the will of God:
The couple, who are Mennonites, believe their daughter’s death was the will of God. When Children’s Health Defense’s director of programming, Polly Tommey, asked specifically about parents who heard their story and might be “rushing out, panicking,” to get the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, the parents rebuked the intervention that offered the best chance of preventing their daughter’s death.
“Don’t do the shots,” the girl’s mother said. Measles, she added, is “not as bad as they’re making it out to be.” She noted that her four other children all recovered after having received alternative treatments from an anti-vaccine doctor, including cod liver oil, a source of vitamin A, and budesonide, an inhaled steroid usually used for asthma.
Again, everything old is new again and new is old again, including RFK Jr.’s response. This time around, he did go to Texas to attend the funeral of the girl who died:
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited the epicenter of Texas’ still-growing measles outbreak on Sunday, the same day a funeral was held for a second young child who was not vaccinated and died from a measles-related illness.
Kennedy said in a social media post that he was working to “control the outbreak” and went to Gaines County to comfort the families who have buried two young children. He was seen late Sunday afternoon outside of a Mennonite church where the funeral services were held, but he did not attend a nearby news conference held by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the outbreak.Seminole is the epicenter of the outbreak, which started in late January and continues to swell — with nearly 500 cases in Texas alone, plus cases from the outbreak believed to have spread to New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas and Mexico.
The optimist in me likes to hope that encountering people who suffered unimaginable loss due to a vaccine-preventable disease might change RFK Jr. Did it? Judging from his response, probably not. Characteristically, he posted his response to X, the hellsite formerly known as Twitter:
Notice how RFK Jr. buried that statement about the “most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine” almost as an afterthought, after having touted how supposedly the growth rates for new cases and hospitalizations have “flattened.” The overall message comes across to me as grudgingly admitting that the MMR vaccine works but implying that it’s probably not that necessary anymore because things are getting better. (Hint: If an another child dies, things aren’t getting better. Actually, just objectively, the outbreak is not yet waning.)
While it might be a good thing that RFK Jr. sees the actual fruits of his two decades of antivaccine fear mongering about vaccines, including the MMR, somehow I doubt that it will change him, but his post did have its intended effect, resulting in a number of news reports that took his statement at face value and ignored context, resulting in headlines like:
- ‘Most effective way’ to prevent measles is vaccination, RFK Jr. says, in most direct remarks yet (STAT News)
- RFK: MMR vaccine is the “most effective way” to prevent measles spread (Axios)
- RFK Jr. consoles Texas family: MMR vaccine ‘most effective’ way to stop measles spread (The Hill)
Notice what RFK Jr. didn’t do? He didn’t do what past HHS Secretaries and CDC Directors did in the face of measles outbreaks or outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases. He didn’t urge families to vaccinate their children. He didn’t mobilize mass vaccination efforts and public messaging campaigns about the vaccine. He just said that the MMR is the “most effective” way to prevent measles spread without actively encouraging vaccination. (Hell, he barely passively recommended vaccination.) It’s because he can’t promote vaccination. Even if he could bring himself to say explicitly that the MMR vaccine is safe and effective and doesn’t cause autism (or all the other things he’s claimed that it causes), MAHA has framed vaccination solely as an individual choice without regard to society at large. Unfortunately, mainstream media outlets appear so eager to promote a message that RFK Jr. is normal—or, at least, not entirely unreasonable—that they leapt to take at face value his grudging statement about MMR while ignoring its context and insincerity.
Meanwhile, Sen. Bill Cassidy posted:
We actually now do know that the child was, unsurprisingly, not vaccinated.
Too bad that Sen. Cassidy could have stopped RFK Jr.’s nomination in its tracks but was too cowardly to do so. He can try to assuage his conscience now by playing at being the voice of science, but it’s too late.
Finally, if Sen. Cassidy thinks that maybe RFK Jr. has learned something and changed his tune, he should just check out what he posted later yesterday:
Lest anyone think that RFK Jr. was serious when he said that vaccination was the best measure to prevent the spread of measles, notice that there’s no mention of vaccines or of the importance of getting vaccinated in this post. Instead, he is touting a visit with a quack who has been using unproven and ineffective measles treatments. (I really do need to write about Ben Edwards’ “protocols.”) The message couldn’t be plainer.
Enter The Secret
The interesting thing about the soft eugenics of MAHA and the antivax movement is that it isn’t just about “survival of the fittest” (or health of the fittest); that is, unless you consider fitness to include will, as in triumph of the will. Beres said it one way:
You’re hearing the language of soft eugenics. And when you hear the blaming of chronic disease on fat people who don’t know how to control their urges, which is something I’ve seen for years in the wellness landscape, yeah, you’re hearing soft eugenics. It’s this moralizing of wellness, this idea that your health is only dependent on you.
And if you can’t achieve it, you’ve failed. Because there’s a level of unacknowledged privilege that’s infected wellness for a long time. It might be genetic privilege.
It’s often financial privilege. But what you’re really hearing is someone say, you, you’re not me. And when you unpack that sentiment, it actually translates to, I’ve had a set of opportunities and access that I’m blind to, because I just assume everyone has the same opportunities and access.
That’s an excellent way of saying it. For example, I love to refer to Bill Maher’s long-ago claim that his lifestyle was so healthy that he couldn’t catch the flu. The example that he used was that, were he to fly in an airplane in which a lot of the passengers were coughing, he would not catch the flu. This claim led to one of my favorite retorts, a retort so brilliant that, even 16 years after writing about it, I still remember it and still refer to it. It came from, of all people, Bob Costas, who gave Maher serious side-eye and said sarcastically, “Oh, come on, Superman!”
Perhaps the most blatant example of this attitude comes from an episode of The Highwire with Del Bigtree posted in June 2020, when he dismissed the idea that he is obligated to do anything for those susceptible to death or severe complications from COVID-19, the frequency of whom he rates at 0.26%, completely blaming the victim:
But here’s the problem. When you were my age, you were most likely eating food and fast food and Doritos and drinking Coca-Cola, which you’ll never find in my home. You were eating that all the time. You probably were drinking a lot of alcoholic beverages and really liked to party and enjoyed your cigarettes and said to yourself, “You know what? It’s more about the quality of my life right now. I don’t care if I live to be 100 years old. I want to enjoy my life right now. I like the finer things in life. I like good rich food. I like smoking a cigarette once in a while. I like to drink my drinks.” And you know what? Good on you! That’s the United States of America. No problem, that, some of my best friends think like that. It’s great, and they’re fun to hang out with. That’s perfectly OK.
But here’s what’s not OK. When you reach that point in your life where now your arteries are starting to clog up, your body is shutting down, and the alcohol is eating up your liver, and you have diabetes, or you have COPD, you have asthma, you can’t breathe, all the cigarette smoking has finally caught up with you, you have heart disease because of the way you decided to live your life in the moment, here’s what you are now. You are pharmaceutical-dependent. You did that to yourself, not me. You decided that the moment mattered, and now you find yourself pharmaceutical-dependent, which is really what that 0.26% is, and that’s OK too. Thank God there’s drugs out there! There’s drugs that allow you to eat the Philly cheesesteak even though your body knows it hates it, but, go ahead, take the Prilosec. What difference does it make? Drug yourself! Drug yourself! Get through the day! Don’t exercise! Maybe just attach an electrode and see if a little electricity to the stomach will give you the abs you want.
What follows is Bigtree moralizing about those who had not been sufficiently “virtuous” and now have chronic disease with respect to vaccine mandates, which he views as being forced to become “pharmaceutical-dependent”:
Or could we live and let live? Eat all the Twinkies you want! Drink all the bourbon you want, and smoke as many cigarettes as you want, and when you find yourself pharmaceutical-dependent I will go ahead and say thank God the drug companies are there for you, but you do not get to make me pharmaceutical-dependent. You do not get to put me in the way of Heidi Larson, who wants to eradicate natural health and natural immunity and make us all pharmaceutical dependent.
See what I mean?
I look at it slightly differently though. While it is true that MAHA seems to view health as a result of virtue, as evidenced by virtuous behavior (as defined by MAHA, of course), I hear echoes of The Secret in MAHA that I wrote about a couple of months ago, inspired by—of course!—RFK Jr.’s answers at his confirmation hearing, specifically:
Specifically, the key part of the exchange that caught my ear was this part of RFK Jr.’s answer to the question, which occurred after he had dodged and weaved in order not to give a definite yes/no answer:
Free speech doesn’t cost anybody anything, but in health care, if you smoke cigarettes for 20 years and you get cancer you are now taking from the pool. Are you guaranteed the same right?
Does this sound familiar? It’s a recurring theme that we hear from believers in alternative and “natural” medicine, namely the victim-blaming idea of lifestyle über alles in medicine, the judgmental mindset that if you are ill it is your fault. This is, of course, very much like what Beres was saying. If I were to sum up the idea succinctly, it is the concept that virtue equals health and that, if you are not healthy, you must not be virtuous. In this context, “virtue” means leading a “virtuous” lifestyle with respect to health; i.e., eating a healthy diet, exercising, not indulging in habits that contribute to chronic disease, etc. Consequently, if you develop lung cancer or heart disease as a result of your having smoked cigarettes for 20 or 30 years, somehow you are less deserving of healthcare. It’s a concept that suffuses the antivax movement too, with claims that diet and healthy living can prevent disease better than any vaccine.
I’ve written more than once over the years about the central idea that undergirds alternative medicine (which MAHA includes as a major part of what it is), an idea that I once called the central dogma of alternative health, namely a variant of “The Secret,” or, as I like to call it, “wishing makes it so.” Recall that The Secret posits the universe will provide what you need and want if only you want it badly enough. While it is true that if you want something badly enough, you are far more likely to strive to get it, The Secret makes it seem as though it is an ironclad law that if you want something badly enough, the universe will provide. In the case of MAHA, it manifests—if you’ll excuse my use of the word—as the idea that a virtuous lifestyle with respect to health will ward off all disease, the flip side being that, if you’re sick, then you must not have been living a virtuous enough lifestyle or wanted health badly enough.
Bringing it all together, “fitness” in MAHA (and the antivax movement) thus involves not just genetic fitness, but it also involves moral fitness, with “moral” being whatever MAHA decides is virtuous with respect to health. It’s an attitude that underlies a lot of the unproven treatments and “biohacking” promoted by MAHA, as Beres notes:
It’s often financial privilege. But what you’re really hearing is someone say, you, you’re not me. And when you unpack that sentiment, it actually translates to, I’ve had a set of opportunities and access that I’m blind to, because I just assume everyone has the same opportunities and access.
And this is the mentality that often leads to assuming biohacking protocols and untested supplements are the keys to optimal health, not money or geography or social status. And that blindness leads to a set of assumptions about health that doesn’t reflect the biological, social, historical, or geographical factors that all play into individual health. And if you’re that far off the mark with individual health, well, public health is definitely going to elude you.
That’s also what allows you to look at one of the greatest health interventions in human history and say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I’m not gonna believe centuries of scientific rigor testing and yes, failures, to where we’ve come to today. Instead, I’m going to stand firm in my conviction that cod liver oil is a better therapeutic than a vaccine.
Yes, I realize that I forgot to mention that RFK Jr. did indeed suggest that cod liver oil could treat measles. At its core, MAHA, of which RFK Jr.’s antivaccine activists is but a part (albeit a huge part), makes health an individual responsibility, denying any sort of public or collective responsibility and defining health as the result of individual willpower, actions, and virtue with respect to health. It ignores social determinants of health, how infectious diseases like measles cannot be controlled with a focus on the individual alone and requires a public health effort, opting instead to make all health and public health a matter of will and good ol’ American “do it yourself” doggedness and ingenuity.
It will be interesting—and likely in many cases tragic—to see what happens when the fantasy of MAHA meets the reality of dealing with healthcare policy on a national level. In the case of measles, so far it hasn’t been a pretty sight, as Dr. Offit and the recently ousted Dr. Peter Marks, the FDA’s recently ousted Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), head of both note, but it won’t just be measles where reality will collide with fantasy, particularly given the massive cuts to HHS that would hamstring RFK Jr. from accomplishing much, even if he were competent and reality-based.