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At John Kass News, physician-author Cory Franklin discusses "What the Media & Experts Aren't Asking About Measles."
Having not heard of Franklin until this morning and finding this story through a conservative news aggregator, I half-expected a bunch of folderol "defending" MAHA, and for a brief moment thought I'd found it in Franklin's first point:
Kennedy just took office! is a classic half-truth, and, were it not for the terms blather and contributory in the above, it might be easy to spin it for the purpose of defending Trump's HHS head.
The problem with such a "defense" of the founder of Children's Health Defense (sic) is that Kennedy had been slandering vaccines for at least two decades before he took office. So while, yes, it would be ridiculous to blame current outbreaks on him or even mostly on him, the date of his appointment hardly exonerates him, either.
Due to his actions long before he took office, Trump's crony is partly responsible for the current outbreaks. (Just by looking at the above link, anyone under 21 who isn't vaccinated may well owe that state to Kennedy's "activism.") Furthermore, his words and deeds both fail to stem that tide and threaten to make future outbreaks more frequent and severe.
If those things don't make Kennedy a poor appointment, I don't know what to tell you.
That said, Franklin's next question suggests to me that journalists are missing an opportunity to bring up or discuss herd immunity, an important aspect of preventing diseases like measles, and perhaps why we're suddenly seeing outbreaks, despite large numbers of people being unvaccinated for so long. Absent that concept, it might be difficult to explain why people should be encouraged to vaccinate, despite their own indifference to catching measles themselves.
Franklin's questions are all thought-provoking, and answering them requires not just a command of "facts on the ground," but an integration of those facts into the kind of knowledge that one needs, at a non-expert level, to fight or avoid illness.
Such knowledge transforms I should get vaccinated from mere dogma to actual knowledge and, on top of motivating a healthy practice, would also cause more people to question the many baseless slanders (disguised as "questions" or not) against vaccination and find them wanting.
-- CAV
Having not heard of Franklin until this morning and finding this story through a conservative news aggregator, I half-expected a bunch of folderol "defending" MAHA, and for a brief moment thought I'd found it in Franklin's first point:
Why are a majority of the patients with measles older than expected?I was primed to expect silliness in part by the fact that some Trump person wrote in to me to the effect that it's wrong to blame Bobby Junior for the current outbreaks because he's been in office for only a year. (I have never said or implied such a thing.)
75% of patients are over 5 years old, and in 2025, more patients were over 20 than were under 5. The peak demographic age is between 5 and 19.
If vaccine skepticism was simply the result of RFK Jr.'s blather (and the COVID pandemic), why is the average age of cases around 9? RFK Jr.'s rhetoric and policies may be contributory but they were not causative for an older demographic that was not vaccinated years before RFK took office.
Kennedy just took office! is a classic half-truth, and, were it not for the terms blather and contributory in the above, it might be easy to spin it for the purpose of defending Trump's HHS head.
The problem with such a "defense" of the founder of Children's Health Defense (sic) is that Kennedy had been slandering vaccines for at least two decades before he took office. So while, yes, it would be ridiculous to blame current outbreaks on him or even mostly on him, the date of his appointment hardly exonerates him, either.
Due to his actions long before he took office, Trump's crony is partly responsible for the current outbreaks. (Just by looking at the above link, anyone under 21 who isn't vaccinated may well owe that state to Kennedy's "activism.") Furthermore, his words and deeds both fail to stem that tide and threaten to make future outbreaks more frequent and severe.
If those things don't make Kennedy a poor appointment, I don't know what to tell you.
That said, Franklin's next question suggests to me that journalists are missing an opportunity to bring up or discuss herd immunity, an important aspect of preventing diseases like measles, and perhaps why we're suddenly seeing outbreaks, despite large numbers of people being unvaccinated for so long. Absent that concept, it might be difficult to explain why people should be encouraged to vaccinate, despite their own indifference to catching measles themselves.
Franklin's questions are all thought-provoking, and answering them requires not just a command of "facts on the ground," but an integration of those facts into the kind of knowledge that one needs, at a non-expert level, to fight or avoid illness.
Such knowledge transforms I should get vaccinated from mere dogma to actual knowledge and, on top of motivating a healthy practice, would also cause more people to question the many baseless slanders (disguised as "questions" or not) against vaccination and find them wanting.
-- CAV
