Anti-Vaxxers: The Dog That Caught the Car

Anti-vaccine activists have successfully scared parents away from vaccines. Now children are dying from measles.

Anti-vaccine activists have been around since the early 1800s. Back then, they were small and poorly organized. Not now. Today’s anti-vaccine activists are lawyer-backed, media savvy, and extraordinarily well-funded. Revenue from antivaccine content on social media alone is about $1 billion per year. Their efforts haven’t gone to waste. More parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children for non-medical reasons than ever before. As a result, the percentage of vaccinated children has dropped below that necessary for community immunity. Measles—the most contagious infectious disease—has come back.

Although we eliminated measles from the United States in 2000, we are currently experiencing a massive measles epidemic. Three people have died from the disease, the same number as died during the previous 25 years. Two of those deaths were in healthy, well-nourished, 6- and 8-years-old girls. Current estimates are that at least 3,000 people in the United States are infected with measles—the largest outbreak in the last 30 years. Because children dying needlessly is not a good look for anti-vaccine activists, they have desperately tried to distance themselves from the deaths and from the epidemic.

Strategy #1: The first measles death was medical malpractice.

To deal with the first measles death, Children’s Health Defense, RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine organization, set up a “crisis team” to manage the media. One team member was Dr. Pierre Kory, who said that the child died from a bacterial pneumonia that “had little to do with measles.” Kory, who was beloved by anti-vaccine activists for his support of ivermectin to treat Covid-19, argued that doctors had failed to treat a pneumonia caused by the bacterium mycoplasma. As a result, the “child died of a medical error—and that error was a completely inappropriate antibiotic.”

Alexander Morozov, a physician-scientist, later challenged Kory’s assumptions in a face-to-face meeting. “I asked him how he could so unequivocally exclude the contribution of measles to the patient’s death,” wrote Morozov. “He repeated his assessment that the death was due to Mycoplasma pneumoniae. I countered that Mycoplasma pneumoniae, also called ‘walking pneumonia,’ is usually mild and by itself wouldn’t explain the fatal outcome.” Kory relented. “That’s fair.,” he said. “Do you want to know the real story on this case? Several of us believe that they weaponized the measles virus—on purpose! She got sicker from this measles probably because they monkeyed with the virus.” Morozov wondered who “they” were. “Who?” asked Morozov. “The military? Pentagon? Wuhan?” Kory responded, “Do you know how many bioweapon labs there are?”

Strategy #2: The second measles death wasn’t caused by measles.

Robert Malone, an anti-vaccine activist, said that the second child died from complications of tonsillitis and mononucleosis. “This is a case of a child suffering from pre-existing conditions who was misdiagnosed,” wrote Malone, who claimed to have reviewed the child’s medical records. He called the New York Times article that reported measles as the cause of death “an outright lie.” Doctors at the UMC Medical Center in Lubbock, Texas, however, contradicted Malone’s claims, stating that the child died from “measles pulmonary failure.”

Strategy #3: Measles is no big deal. Lots of countries have measles.

After the first child died from measles—which was the first child death from the disease in more than 20 years—RFK Jr. reassured President Trump at a White House meeting that measles outbreaks were “not unusual.” Nothing to see here. After the second child died from measles, RFK Jr. tried to reassure the public that two deaths also weren’t that bad. “I would compare it to what’s happening in Europe,” said RFK Jr. “They’ve had 127,000 cases and 37 deaths. And, so, what we are doing in the United States is a model for the rest of the world.” According to RFK Jr., three deaths in one year in the United States was something to evoke pride, not fear. The European region spans 53 countries with vast disparities in health care access, vaccination coverage, and surveillance systems. If, however, you compare the US measles outbreaks to countries with similar healthcare systems, such as Germany or France—instead of Romania and Kazakhstan—the outbreak in Texas is decidedly worse.

Strategy #4: Measles vaccine immunity fades.

RFK Jr. claims that immunity from the MMR vaccine is “leaky,” declining about 5 percent every year. In fact, immunity induced by the MMR vaccine is life-long. Because measles has a long incubation period, which is the time from exposure to the virus to the onset of symptoms, people don’t need measles antibodies in their circulation to prevent infection. All they need are immune memory cells, which are long-lived. If immunity from the vaccine faded, as RFK Jr. claimed, we would never have been able to eliminate this virus by 2000.

The anti-vaccine movement, which has successfully convinced parents not to vaccinate their children using misinformation, science denialism, and conspiracy, is the dog that caught the car. But it is our children who have been caught under the wheels.