how americans voted to make measles great again

We played a very stupid game. Now it's time to collect the very stupid prizes.

After two years of MAHA, the editorial board of the NYT is worried that measles is making a comeback, and as RFK Jr. keeps undermining vaccination and pandemic prevention, other now almost forgotten childhood diseases may come roaring back as if we've regressed back in the pre-industrial world. Which was a) yes, a lot of acronyms in an opening sentence, and b) always going to happen, and anyone who knew anything about the man who was guaranteed to become our Secretary of Plagues and Inhuman Disservices after the last presidential election warned the public that this was in store for all of us.

I mean, did anyone really think that a guy who eats roadkill, had very literal brain worms, and thinks we don't need to worry about germs because he used to snort cocaine off toilet seats, was going to be amazing on public health? His entire career was spent on enabling and advocating the kind of dangerous repeals of vaccine policies we see being adopted by Florida and even the Pentagon, ignoring how infectious diseases used to be the number one killer of children until the 1960s, and soldiers until WW1 and mandatory troop vaccinations.

By the way, Secretary Nurgle doesn't believe that infectious diseases, the scourge of humanity until the last century or so, is anything to worry about and wants to focus on chronic illnesses instead. You know, the same chronic diseases often caused by side effects of childhood infections or are only possible because people are living long and well enough to develop them.

Of course, this is not to say that chronic diseases don't need to be studied and are not a crisis. There are entire books to write on how lifestyle problems like lack of exercise, untreated injuries, excessive drinking, stress, and depression are actively lowering lifespans and quality of life for millions. There are also entire books we could explore on how American society manages to make all of them worse with hostile design of cities and turning your mere existence into something that needs to be justified instead of a fact to deal with. Even focusing on better diet and easier ways to get exercise would make an enormous impact.

But focusing on chronic diseases by ignoring infectious ones is like fighting a war against two enemies and only erecting fortifications and allocating for defensive forces against one of them. The other enemy is still out there, still going very strong, and constantly coming for you. Hell, they executed a massive attack only a few years ago. Just like you wouldn't charge into war with your ass out in the breeze, you can't give up on vaccines and infectious disease prevention just because... uh... your boss did lines off toilets at the club?

Even worse, as our longer lives and better technology are resulting in more and more cancer diagnoses, the aforementioned boss is actively defunding research into one of the most promising new treatments for dozens of types of cancer just because he's firmly devoted to the idea that mRNA is evil and refuses to extract his head from his colon to see the evidence to the contrary. To extend the war analogy, he wants to fight a two front campaign, but on only one front while ignoring the other, and only by using weapons made prior to this millennium.

Alright, so, what is the NYT's brilliant solution for all this? They want Congress, which has effectively abandoned its responsibility as a co-equal branch, to ask Trump, who never admits mistakes and only seems to fire women for cause, to remove RFK Jr. from his post. And if that doesn't happen, have the voters, many of whom actively chose and cheered on this shit show, to pressure the do-nothing Congress and the man who thinks is Emperor of MAGAmerica to save them from the plague they are unleashing on themselves.

Now, the NYT could start to aggressively advocate for good health policy and do its job in actually informing the public about the benefits of not living as if the only thing we should ever be thinking about is how we can generate more value for the shareholders, or stop normalizing an administration which openly wages a Maoist war on science and art because no authority other than Dear Daddy Leader and his paternalistic regime are allowed. But then Republicans will call them more mean names, so no, they won't do that.

So, the only thing left to say is that we have entered the FO stage of FAFO, and a lot of "low information voters" who are so allergic to news, facts, and education that you need to grab the epipen if you want them to listen to something of actual importance, are about to find out the hard way why spending their time spitting in the faces of people who genuinely wanted to help them was a bad idea, and why these people are done being empathetic towards them as they learn said lessons.