MAGAs for Measles: Parties Coming?

For at least two generations, Americans have been able to raise their children in an environment in which measles outbreaks weren’t a thing. The childhood disease, more serious than most think, had gone away. We all had our children vaccinated as babies as a matter of course. No, we don’t want our baby or young child to have polio, measles, mumps, rubella, of course not. When it came time to enroll them in school, we got their vaccinations and records together without a single thought. Childhood diseases that once ravaged the country had disappeared. Then COVID came along at just a point when – having had the diseases gone long enough, people started suspecting the vaccinations themselves as causing harm, forgetting the damned harm they prevented. Additionally, a segment of our society simply doesn’t like being told what to do, really doesn’t like being told what to do by a Democratic president, and thus instinctively reacted against entities that required the COVID vaccination for work. The result was entirely predictable.

My father was still working back then as an intensive care specialist. He had all 20 patients in a full ICU during Delta, all 20 were unvaccinated, he never saw a vaccinated patient in the ICU – many died. Similarly, we now see a measles outbreak in West Texas. Instead of a rush to get children vaccinated, we are now seeing the polar opposite. It has become political and thus there seem to be no limits to rejecting the vaccine. Some must want to have measles parties:

A Texas health authority is warning against “measles parties” as the outbreak in West Texas grew to at least 146 cases, with 20 hospitalized and one unvaccinated school-age child dead.

In a press briefing hosted by the city of Lubbock, Texas, Ron Cook, chief health officer at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock, offered the stark warning for Texans in his opening statements.

“What I want you to hear is: It’s not good to go have measles parties because what may happen is—we can’t predict who’s going to do poorly with measles, be hospitalized, potentially get pneumonia or encephalitis and or pass away from this,” Cook said. “So that’s a foolish idea to go have a measles party. The best thing to do is make sure that you’re well-vaccinated.”

Clearly they had gotten word that some people intended to infect their kids intentionally. By the numbers above, 15% of the kids are sick enough to go to the hospital and almost 1% die. Only in a political environment would people choose to intentionally give their child the disease over simply going to get the child vaccinated. It would tempt a person to call CPS in any other scenario.

It is stunning to consider. It is also important to remember that the initial anti-vax movements came out of what was a more liberal and privileged environment, though it is tough to gauge now. There is a reason that Kennedy is one of the ones leading the charge. Since then, it has become almost a staple of the MAGA Right, who – more than anything, didn’t like Joe Biden standing up there telling them they needed vaccinations. For who knows how long, the government required shots to get into schools or the military and no one thought about it. No one until it was a Democrat telling Trump supporters what needed to be done. Only then did vaccinations become political. “Measles parties” is the outcome. Stunning.

“They used to have them all the time to let the immune system take care of this all naturally… ” True! And kids used to die of these childhood diseases all naturally, too.

God Bless: I can be reached at [email protected] and on twitter-X at @JasonMiciak, and follow now on Bluesky. 

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