This year’s spikes in measles cases could cause the U.S. to lose its “elimination status” by next year after the CDC reports nearly 2,000 cases and 50 outbreaks nationwide.
This year’s spikes in measles cases could cause the U.S. to lose its “elimination status” by next year after the CDC reports nearly 2,000 cases and 50 outbreaks nationwide.
Very true. It’s just fun to use that meme for headlines like this.
Yeah, the reality is that Donvict is a bumbling moron and despite his reputation as one of “building things”, he hasn’t really built jack shit. The conservative project had been working for decades to have the situation where a moron like Donvict could walk in and give the worst people a permission structure to be their very worst selves.
The fact that he paired up with a similar narcissistic jackass on matters of medicine and health is small wonder, and what RFK jr has been doing for decades has done a lot of damage when it comes to vaccines.
The truth is that while neither of these morons is doing anything to educate people on vaccines, the underlying problem is most likely a combination of the ease of spreading disinformation, combined with shitty education on media literacy and critical thinking. In addition, the population of those that experienced how truly awful some of these diseases are first-hand are aging out (not raising children themselves) and/or passing away, and you have very little of that wisdom being passed on to younger generations, who are naively getting their info from their peers or from influencers that are just as ignorant and clueless as they are. Or, maybe even worse, just using piss-poor thought processes like “I don’t see anyone with this disease, why do we even vaccinate against it?”.
Sadly, I don’t see anything that is going to systematically reverse this trend. I don’t think the education pipeline has gotten better. From at least Gen X on down, it’s likely gotten worse in many ways, given how the cons work to dismantle public education and want even less restraint on pushing out disinfo (now supercharged with AI along with the narrowcasting abilities we’ve had for decades now).
The unfortunate thing that may reverse this? Large scale disease/death that newer generations get to experience again, once vaccine use drops below the levels required for herd immunity.
That kind of visceral education may hit home with even the most ignorant and most naive in younger generations, and I think I find that one of the most depressing things of all about the human condition…it’s not like boomers or older Gen X were any smarter about any of this. It’s possible public education was slightly better/less corrupted by conservatives, but mostly that the effect of these diseases were still in living memory.