Poorer, Dumber, and Now Sicker
Under Trump & RFK Jr., measles is back, cruise ships are disease zones & a debunked anti-vaxxer leads autism research. Our health system is overwhelmed by ideology, propaganda and self-serving chaos.
We’re not just heading toward a poorer America, as the richest 10% tighten their grip on our economy. Or a dumber America, with the country’s top research universities gutted. I’ve outlined those issues in the past. We’re also becoming a sicker America.
Measles is spreading uncontrollably with 712 cases as of yesterday, and counting. Nasty bouts of norovirus are slamming cruise ships, and the CDC has fired the very people responsible for keeping it contained. Meanwhile, our new health chief — a relentless anti-vaccine conspiracy peddler — has proudly announced that a study he initiated will find the cause of autism after just a few quick months. Want to bet how that ends?
And all this came to light in just one week.
Our health is now in the hands of two men, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump, who’ve built their careers on lies and seductive half-truths, the kind that sound just smart enough, and just plausible enough, to fool the uninformed, the insecure, and those already primed to resent the world around them.
For years, this odd couple has been desperately seeking to prove to the world at large, and perhaps to themselves, that they’re the only ones who see things clearly and know the real facts. In the past, they’ve each done plenty of damage on their own. But now, working together and backed by the full weight of the federal government, the consequences are multiplying.
And when it comes to public health, the cost is all too often measured in lives.
The second-largest measles outbreak in 25 years has left three dead, including two young children. The outbreak exploded over a span of just 11 weeks or so, with about 70% of the cases involving kids under the age of 19, and 11% of that particular group requiring hospitalization.
Okay, that’s bad, right? Especially given that the U.S. declared the disease eliminated in 2000, with homegrown outbreaks considered a thing of the past.
But then we learn that the CDC’s vessel sanitation program, which conducts health inspections aboard cruise ships and investigates disease outbreaks, has been trashed and all of its staffers fired, according to a CBS News report. This comes as around a dozen norovirus outbreaks have sickened hundreds of cruise ship passengers in just the first four months of 2025..
Yup, that’s bad too.
And finally, RFK Jr. is now insisting we’ll know the “cause” of autism by September, less than five months after he launched a taxpayer-funded study involving David Geier, a key figure in the anti-vaxx movement and a long-discredited huckster with no meaningful scientific credentials.
Quite a week for American health care, right? And it follows a week in which Kennedy Jr. announced he’s firing 10,000 people, added to the 10,000 that have already resigned, disgusted over where Trump and Kennedy Jr. were leading the nation.
A Measles Rebirth
Let’s take a moment to walk through some of the details on these three items, starting with the growing number of measles cases appearing since the far-right began using vaccinations as a political tool during the pandemic, rather than a common sense medical practice that’s saved millions of lives over time.
With two dead kids, a dead adult, and roughly 80 people — mostly children — sick enough to be hospitalized, you might think Kennedy Jr. would get the idea that mandatory vaccination for children in schools isn’t such a bad idea, right? Instead, he is continuing to shrug off these outbreaks the way he did during a White House Cabinet meeting after the first child died in late February. At that point, there were just 130 or so cases.
The worst outbreak of measles came in 2019 when 1,282 people were infected within the tight-knit Orthodox Jewish communities in New York. That crisis wasn’t driven by theology, it was driven by isolation and disinformation, much of it supplied by anti-vaccine activists in both the U.S. and Israel, including the Children's Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group headed then by our own RFK Jr.
That group and Kennedy Jr. faced significant criticism at the time for their role in spreading false claims about vaccine safety. Notably, in May of that year, several of Kennedy Jr.’s family members publicly condemned his anti-vaccine stance, emphasizing in an op-ed in Politico that his views were "tragically wrong."
Kennedy Jr. was also directly involved in a legal action in 2019 challenging the mandatory vaccinations put in place to contain the outbreak. But a judge dismissed the case, stating that the city's measures were necessary given the severity of the situation, and vaccine mandates eventually brought the outbreak to a close.
Now, once again, an outbreak is spreading through a group largely cut off from mainstream public health infrastructure and independent media. Gaines County in West Texas, where the outbreak began, is home to a large Mennonite population, a deeply insular group. And just as they did in 2019, anti-vaccine activists have eagerly stepped into the vacuum.
What’s different this time is the political backdrop.
In late March, the Trump administration slashed more than $12 billion from public health funding, and Kennedy Jr. ordered that 10,000 staffers be fired after another 10,000 workers had already left of their own accord. The cuts included doctors, epidemiologists, lab scientists and the everyday workers who keep the lights on, the data flowing, the inspections happening, and the systems running.
The Trump administration keeps saying that these type of cutbacks are designed to save money, trim waste and overcome bloat. But this isn’t really about all that, is it? It’s about limiting the voices that can be heard officially in government to those that hew most closely to the Trump ideology, and to Kennedy’s extreme need to raise his personal profile by attacking the existing system.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, perhaps best describes this effort in a story in today’s New York Times. “This is a simultaneous process of increasing the likelihood that you will hear his voice and decreasing the likelihood that you’ll hear other voices,” she’s quoted as saying.
Kennedy Jr., she added, is “decertifying other voices of authority.”
The fallout from the manpower cuts was immediate: more than 50 vaccination clinics across Texas were scrapped, and dozens of public health workers were laid off. We shouldn’t kid ourselves. This isn’t just a regional crisis. It’s the predictable result of putting public health in the hands of those who care more about their political ideology than the people they’re supposed to serve.
Measles isn’t something to fool around with. It’s one of the most contagious viruses on earth, lingering in the air for as long as two hours after an infected person has left. If not properly treated, it can lead to pneumonia, brain inflammation, blindness, long-term immune damage, and a rare but fatal brain disorder.
In the past, Kennedy Jr. has insisted vaccination should be a “personal choice” rather than a collective responsibility, and he’s never publicly changed that view. And the nation and its children are worse off as a result.
Norovirus on the High Seas
My wife and I have long been considering taking a cruise. No longer. Instead, we’re staying at home and making sure we’re caught up on all the recommended vaccines we need to stay healthy and enjoy our summer.
Why? In just the first 3 1/2 months of 2025, the CDC has recorded at least 12 gastrointestinal illness outbreaks on cruise ships, heading toward the 18 outbreaks logged in all of 2024 and coming within a stone’s throw of the 14 reported in all of 2023.
And now the office charged with conducting health inspections aboard cruise ships and investigating outbreaks has been eliminated, even as 15 new cruise ships with a combined capacity of 38,629 potential norovirus sufferers are set to be added to the global fleet.
Think about that for a moment.
Most of the gastrointestinal outbreaks recorded on cruise ships have been linked to norovirus, a highly contagious stomach bug. Among the worst outbreaks this year: the Queen Mary 2 saw 266 passengers and 19 crew fall ill during a March voyage that included a stop in New York. Holland America’s Rotterdam had 152 passengers and 17 crew sickened during a 12-day Panama Canal cruise.
Both ships fall under the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program, which requires cruise lines to report outbreaks and undergo regular inspections if they stop in U.S. ports, regardless of where they’re registered or based. That means even foreign-flagged ships like the Queen Mary 2 must comply with U.S. health standards the moment they dock on American shores.
The CDC sanitation program was established in 1975 after a series of gastrointestinal illness outbreaks on cruise ships. Since its creation, the industry has grown from just 21 ships to more than 500, and the ships sailing now are substantially larger, designed to carry more people every year. That’s given this program growing responsibility to oversee sanitation standards.
But apparently no longer.
CDC officials now working under Kennedy Jr. say confidently that others in an agency will take over the responsibility. But the agency, as a whole, has been severely hamstrung by the Trump administration’s cutbacks.
Norovirus, meanwhile, is a truly miserable infection, lasting for just about the amount of time you might take to enjoy a cruise. In healthy adults, it can induce sudden vomiting, diarrhea, severe stomach cramps, nausea and, at times, a fever, headache, body aches. That’s in a healthy adult. In folks over 65, infants, and the immunocompromised: It can lead to severe dehydration and complications requiring hospitalization.
In the U.S., Norovirus leads to about 900 deaths annually, mainly in adults over 65, a risk group that takes in both me and my beautiful wife. Like I said, no cruises for us, at least until Kennedy Jr. and Trump are gone.
Cherry-Picked?
Last month, Kennedy Jr. announced he was using our tax money to fund a new study on the cause of autism, a long-used attack vehicle for him and the anti-vaxx movement. Later, it came out that David Geier, a discredited huckster with little credible scientific background, would be involved with the study.
Now RFK Jr. says the results of this new research should be available in September, an extraordinarily short time to get such an effort done in any legitimate fashion. But if you’re just trying to prove a point, I guess it doesn’t much matter how long it takes.
Going in, we know that Kennedy Jr. has connected vaccines to autism in at least 36 public appearances since 2020, according to a Washington Post report from late January. And that’s without a single legitimate study to support the claim. Is there any real doubt that a team handpicked by Kennedy Jr. will “find” exactly what he wants them to find?
Yeah, I don’t think so either.
The heart of science is uncertainty, not dogma. It begins with a question, not with an answer you’re desperate to support. True science tests possibilities, follows evidence, and accepts whatever truth the data reveals. Sometimes the answers lie at the margins. Sometimes they challenge what we thought we knew. That’s the point. When so-called researchers start with a conclusion and work backwards, it’s not science. It’s propaganda in a lab coat.
David Geier has long been involved with anti-vaxx networks, and is perhaps best known for publishing junk research that sought to link the mercury-based preservative thimerosal to autism. But thimerosal was removed from most childhood vaccines in the early 2000s, and autism rates continued to rise.
In 2012, Maryland state authorities found Geier was practicing medicine without a license, a move that also led to the revocation of licenses for two doctors he worked with, including his father, Mark Geier. Meanwhile, federal judges have rejected the Geiers’ work on vaccines as too flawed to make a legitimate point in court.
The misconception that autism and vaccines are linked originated from a 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield that was later retracted due to ethical violations and data manipulation, and Wakefield lost his medical license.
Despite its retraction, however, the study was widely promoted by groups like the one led by RFK Jr. before he pushed his way on to the political scene, and work by Geier. Since then, numerous large-scale studies have been conducted to examine the potential link between vaccines and autism:. Let’s look at two of the largest:
A 2014 meta-analysis involving over 1.2 million children found no association between vaccination and autism spectrum disorder .
A 2019 Danish study tracking over 650,000 children concluded there was no increased risk of autism following MMR vaccination, even among those with autistic siblings.
Autism researchers, doctors who deal with the disorder daily, and parent-based groups agree that the huge rise in autism cases over the past few decades has occured for several reasons that are largely ignored by Kennedy Jr., Trump in his statements lately, and the band of misfits RFK Jr. is keeping close ties with.
These include greater awareness, broader definitions that reflect a wide-ranging spectrum of symptoms from mild to extreme, better screening tools and earlier detection. The exact cause of autism remains unclear, but genetics, advanced parental age, prenatal exposure to air pollution or pesticides, and other environmental factors may all contribute, the true experts have suggested.
The Kennedy Conundrum
I’ve written more than once that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may be the least qualified and most dangerous person ever to run the nation’s health agencies. As someone who covered health & science as a journalist for 25 years give or take, I still track the field closely, even in retirement.
As a group, the media and the online world of worriers has tended to focus on the economic problems the nation faces from the Trump administration, the unfairness and cruelty, and his push for absolute and unlimited power. But our personal health is equally as important, and it too is under attack.
The Trump administration is seeking to make us poorer with its insistence on unrealistic tariffs that will hurt consumers, and dumber with its cutbacks on universities and academic science. And, finally, it threatens to make us sicker, with Kennedy Jr. in control of the nation’s health systems.
Here are a few past columns you might want to review at your leisure that pin down just what we’re facing:
Trump, Kennedy Jr., Elon Musk, Trump’s other Cabinet minions, and the far-right cabal behind Project 2025, the government’s new bible, are racing us toward a form of leadership where truth is optional and power is sealed off.
Policy is now built on fringe theories, billionaire whim and a political philosophy that worships strength, fears diversity and sees control—not justice—as the primary purpose of government. I find it frightening. What do you think?