‘Playing with American lives’: Devastating outbreak smashing US as vaccine rates plummet

A terrifying outbreak is spreading across the United States – and a single decision by the President could make things so much worse.

OPINION

She was six.

No one knows her name.

Whether she liked her crusts cut off or her hair in plaits or Bluey.

When a journalist arrived in the small west Texas city of Seminole where she died, her father, Peter, told them, “She just kept getting sicker and sicker”.

In February, she was put on a ventilator.

“We were there Saturday ’til Monday, three days … and then it was worse, very bad,” Peter told The Atlantic.

On that Tuesday night, his daughter died.

Hers was the first recorded US measles death in a decade – a disease that was officially eradicated in the country 25 years ago – as a devastating outbreak spreads across the country.

Of the more than 222 current cases, most are in children who were not vaccinated, per the Centres for Disease Control.

So what better moment for President Donald Trump to put a science-doubting, quackery-loving man in charge of the nation’s health?

What could possibly go wrong?

The question is, with Mr Trump’s appointment of vocal vaccine sceptic Robert F. Kennedy Junior to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary, with the president’s enthusiastic stoking of broader mistrust and with vaccine rates falling, is he playing with American lives?

Cases of measles are exploding across the US. Picture: iStock

Fun fact: Measles would result in the deaths of 1800 Americans and hospitalise 400,000 every year without the vaccine, according to the laugh-a-minute Journal of Infectious Diseases.

An outbreak in Philadelphia in 1991 killed nine kids.

“Nightmare would not be too strong a term,” said the city’s then-deputy health commissioner Dr Robert Ross at the time.

That “nightmare” was meant to be over.

It is not.

Today, the “nightmare” could be just beginning, thanks to Mr Trump and Mr Kennedy.

You might think measles is just some annoying childhood illness, but it is so much more.

It is, in fact, one of the most contagious and lethal viruses known to humans and is six times more contagious than ebola.

It can lead to pneumonia, as was the case with the Texas six-year-old, or a brain swelling known as encephalitis. It can also cause permanent blindness, deafness and intellectual disability.

The virus is especially dangerous for anyone under the age of five and the majority of the 100,000 measles deaths still happening in the developing world are children.

In late January, coincidentally around the time of the president’s reinstallation in the White House, the Texas outbreak began, with cases soon popping up in Alaska, California, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr is a vocal vaccine sceptic. Picture: Brandon Bell/Getty Images North America/Getty Images via AFP

About a week after the death of Peter’s daughter, an adult in neighbouring New Mexico became the outbreak’s second recorded death.

In both cases, they were unvaccinated.

The story of this outbreak is fundamentally a story about distrust; something that Mr Trump and Mr Kennedy have been both stoking, stoking, stoking for their own separate purposes.

It is no accident that vaccination rates are falling as general trust in institutions like the government, justice system, elections and the media are plummeting – and as MAGA has been on the rip-roaringly ascendant.

Mr Kennedy is the co-founder of the Children’s Health Defence, which is, according to the New York Times, “a leading spreader of anti-vaccine falsehoods”.

Just this week, Mr Kennedy was promoting the idea that poor diet might be one of the causes of the current measles outbreak. See? It was the double stuffed extra cheese, super-sized whopper in the library with the candlestick all along.

Cases of measles are on the rise in West Texas. Picture: Jan Sonnenmair/Getty Images/AFP

Don’t worry though, he also thinks cod liver oil is a good treatment option.

He thinks fluoride in the water is connected with cancer and IQ loss, has argued that chemicals in water are linked to transgender identity, has said “autism comes from vaccines”, questioned whether AIDS is caused by the HIV virus, promoted the idea that school shootings are linked to the use of antidepressants, called the coronavirus vaccine the “deadliest vaccine ever made”, believes that the CIA killed his uncle John F. Kennedy Jnr and that in 2004 the Republicans stole the presidential election, which returned George W. Bush to White House.

All of this has been so fully and irrefutably disproved by scientists and experts and lavishly credentialed boffins I am considering asking news.com.au if I can start adding double

underlined, bolded footnotes. Show of hands, who’s keen?

But while I wait for the votes to be tallied, it’s the bigger picture that matters far more.

As downright warped as Mr Kennedy’s long-debunked beliefs are, as he does his darnedest to turn the scientific dial back a good century (leeches anyone?), he would not have the current power he has over the health of 350 million Americans if not for the man who installed him in the first place.

Him.

Nearly one in three Republicans think ‘vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they were designed to protect’. Picture: Angela Weiss/AFP

The only reason that Mr Kennedy has the job as HHS Secretary is that it suits Mr Trump right down to the toes.

Mr Kennedy’s elevation to government is not about Mr Trump being a science sceptic or vaccine denier, but far baser, naked political self interest.

Morning, noon and night, I reckon there is only ever one single, solitary question that the president asks himself: What is best for Donald John Trump?

And a vast, sweeping tide of American distrust suits him. Because Trumpism only works – it can only flourish and malignantly grow – in a stewing petri dish of fear and doubt and anger.

So, over the nearly decade since he entered the political arena, Mr Trump has energetically cultivated hostility towards the established institutions of modern life, things like science and government and the press.

It’s in his own interest to evermore vigorously fan the flames of doubt and paranoia and hostility and denialism that have become the defining symptoms of MAGA, something he does like a man with his own antique collection of bellows. Blow baby, blow.

It’s in Mr Trump's own interest to 'evermore vigorously fan the flames of doubt and paranoia'. Picture: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

The end result is an America that has largely stopped believing.

In January this year, the Edelman Trust Barometer found that 72 per cent of Americans believe government leaders lie, 62 per cent believe business leaders do, and 65 per cent believe journalists do – all jumps since 2021.

As of 2025, nearly one in three Republicans (31 per cent) think “vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they were designed to protect”.

Only five per cent of Dems do.

Meanwhile, whooping cough cases are climbing in the US, and in 2022, a man in New York was left partly paralysed by polio.

Mr Trump has put Mr Kennedy into the HHS because ultimately, it helps him.

Or to put it another way, he has weaponised childrens’ health to further his larger political project.

Today, the US measles outbreak is still growing and spreading.

How long until it’s officially “nightmare” time?

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles

Originally published as ‘Playing with American lives’: Devastating outbreak smashing US as vaccine rates plummet