In Trump America, vaccination rates are decreasing and measles spread

New CDC data suggests an emergence from the back -to -school shortage: in 2024, kindergarten vaccination rates decreased for the fifth consecutive year. Meanwhile, vaccine exemptions have reached a record.

These statistics became all the more disturbing last fall when, shortly after 286,000 children began their education without proof of complete immunity against measles, a man who boasted of never having a flu component was re -elected to the presidency. Since then, the United States has supported its greatest measles epidemic in three decades, while leaders who should eradicate this crisis attract the flames. In just eight months, Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Ministry of Health and Social Services, did everything possible to undermine one of the great civilizing advances of the 20th century – our public health infrastructure. In doing so, they may endanger millions of people and start a loop of misfortune which he could take decades to recover.

As usual, the position of the Trump administration on vaccines is less motivated by sincere populism and more by personal profit. Before Kennedy launched his own presidential campaign on a platform to “make America healthy”, he won $ 20,000 each week to direct a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the skepticism of vaccines. Now in the cabinet, he has drawn the entire CDC vaccine advisory committee and replaced it with a figure crew, half of which have never published research evaluated by peers on vaccines. Last week, Kennedy canceled $ 500 million in federal funding for mRNA vaccines, which prevented 14 million dead during the COVVI-19 pandemic. And he made these withdrawals while retaining a financial participation in current disputes against a vaccine manufacturer.

During all this time, the United States has seen more than 1,300 cases of measles and three deaths this year. In response, Kennedy has alternately approved and undermined the most effective prevention method – widespread immunization.

The funding of funding has extended through science, Trump reducing research support to a 35 -year -old Nadir. During the National Institutes of Health, 1,800 subsidies were dismissed, a decision that the government’s responsibility office deemed illegal. The administration also continues to freeze grants to universities on cultural war fantasies like Dei, including $ 339 million at the UCLA and $ 2.2 billion in Harvard. It is therefore not surprising that 75% of American scientists interviewed Nature plan to leave the country, which raises the perspective of a lost generation of American talents and vital innovation.

Internationally, Trump’s heartless and thoughtless budget cuts cause devastation. The administration has dismantled USAID, one of the most successful preventive of contagious disease in history. In doing so, he funded programs that have vaccinated more than 800 million children against deadly diseases such as malaria. The researchers found that 300,000 people have already died due to these cuts, which could lead to another 14 million avoidable deaths over the next five years, which will be able to empty an agency that has managed the equivalent of 4% of the annual national defense budget.

In the United States, medical associations, local officials and individual doctors collaborate to buy vaccines directly from manufacturers and lobbying insurance companies to continue to cover the costs of these blows. Their efforts reflect a proven strategy to counter the sub-immunization. Before the current epidemic, Ronald Reagan’s cuts – from the era to public health caused a more widespread measles pandemic, with only 27,000 cases in 1990. But locally directed awareness campaigns and popular vaccination programs have given the crisis, as is a possible restoration of federal funds under the administration of Bill Clinton.

Budget cuts can be reversed, but confidence can be more difficult to recover. Long before the ascendancy of RFK Jr., disasters such as the infamous study of untreated syphilis of the CDC in Tuskegee and the ice answer of the Food and Drug Administration to the AIDS crisis project long shadows on public health establishments. Today, a plurality of Americans already predict that they will lose confidence in medical advice under the current administration. This would undermine the very basis of public health, which depends on people who choose to follow the directives based on research that they have not carried out personally and of which they are poorly trained in analysis.

The repair of this violation will require years of creation of relations, but this could also require rallying Americans with the classic patriotism tactics. For all of Trump’s bellicose rhetoric, it is missing that the most extraordinary scientific and medical advances in our country have sparked bipartite enthusiasm in part because they have strengthened perceived American exceptionalism. At the height of the Cold War, the uncle of RFK Jr. chose to go to the moon, and Richard Nixon brought this dream to fulfillment. After Franklin Delano Roosevelt founded the National Foundation for Infant Palsy, the Americans helped finance it by sending more than 2.5 million sous, hence its baptism as the Marche des Ten. This money supported the development by Jonas Salk of the polio vaccine. Within two years of his introduction, the annual cases of Polio had dropped by 90%.

Even Trump, who botched the initial response to COVID-19, managed to supervise the historic speed of operation WARP. If only he could recognize that This is the kind of success that makes great America.