Childhood immunisation is a modern scientific marvel. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Vaccination rates against childhood diseases have been on a downward slide for the past few years in the United States. Nationally, for example, the share of kindergarteners with completed records for the measles vaccine dropped to 93 percent last year, down from 95 percent in 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Polio, whooping cough, and chickenpox vaccination rates have likewise slumped since the pandemic.
Vaccines are one of the marvels of modern science, allowing our species to overcome some of our oldest microscopic adversaries. The erosion of public support for childhood immunisation is thus lamentable, not to mention dangerous. Yet public-health and government authorities looking for someone to blame for growing vaccine scepticism might wish to look in the mirror: Their Covid and gender excesses have done a great deal to sow distrust among parents.
In a much-discussed report on Monday, The New York Times insisted on making this a partisan issue, noting that the number of kids receiving vaccine exemptions rose in states that Donald Trump won in November’s election. But exemptions are up in some Kamala Harris states, too. As The Times conceded, “the story with noncompliance is more complex” than the partisan headline figures might suggest. “It rose in both blue and red states, although more in red states”.
In short: The partisan angle tells only part of the story, as does the proliferation of crank ideas on the online right (a phenomenon that predates the pandemic, though it went on hyperdrive in the wake of it). Authorities in red states might be making it easier to obtain the exemptions. Or it could be that the great migration of the Covid era has reshuffled people into regions that more closely match their opinion on the issue of vaccinations. Or some combination of these factors may be at work. The bottom line, though, is that these and other factors wouldn’t be as significantly in play but for the breakdown in trust between many families and health agencies. That trust will take a long time to rebuild — that is, if it even can be rebuilt.
Start with the source of the decline data: The CDC is at the top of the list of agencies that destroyed trust. Rochelle Walensky took over as the agency’s director on the day President Biden was inaugurated. Biden had promised to reopen schools in the first 100 days of his presidency. As you might recall, this wasn’t seen as a particularly ambitious goal, since that timeline would put the reopening date in May, right around when schools would be closing for the summer anyway. Yet by February, even that meager plan was scrapped.
Text messages showed that Walensky cowered to Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, and changed school-opening guidelines based on the union boss’s demands. No science was involved in the decision: a special interest group was allowed to influence policy at the nation’s top health agency.
As if that alone weren’t egregious enough, Walensky’s also shotgunned her own credibility. There seemed to be a lot of simple guessing in her comments. In November 2021, Walensky said that masks are 80% effective in reducing Covid spread, a figure that appears to have been made up on the spot. If true, that would have meant masks were far more effective than vaccines in stopping infection, a claim the CDC would never have made.
It wasn’t just Walensky who bungled or politicised the Covid-19 response. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of America’s war on Covid, frequently and unaccountably reversed himself or simply lied to the American people. He admitted to misleading the public on the efficacy of masks because of mask shortages at the outset of the pandemic. But in a closed-door interview session in January 2024 before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Fauci admitted that he had pushed regulations such as the six-feet rule and masking without having any clear evidence that these prescriptions would be effective.
Both Walensky and Fauci pushed the Covid vaccine on children, even after it was clear that the jabs didn’t stop the spread. In October 2022, a CDC advisory committee voted unanimously to add the Covid vaccine and the corresponding boosters to the recommended immunisation schedule for children as young as 6 months old. By then, it was clear that the shot didn’t prevent transmission, so the argument was it “reduces risk of serious outcome”. Of course, kids faced a minuscule risk of serious outcomes in the first place.
This was nearly a year after European countries had started limiting the Covid vaccine for kids as data about myocarditis revealed the risk presented to teenage boys. The CDC was aware, too, that boys were far more at risk than girls, which led to a curious choice in its presentation of data. As David Zweig reported for Wired: “In the advisory-committee meeting, a slide was presented that showed that within seven days following the second dose, males aged 12 to 17 had a rate of 62.75 myocarditis cases per million, whereas females had a rate of 8.68. Averaging the two rates yields 35.72 cases. Yet the rate for young males is more than seven times that of young females”. The CDC frequently lumped the two together.
It wasn’t just Covid where public trust in health agencies and “expert” organisations was shattered. There was also the gender question. The CDC recommended the vaccine to “pregnant people” and removed all references to “women” from its vaccine website. Last year, the CDC presented guidance on “chest-feeding” — that is to say, pretend breastfeeding by biological males using “medication to induce lactation.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics is just as guilty of becoming a political operation with a health-care name. During the pandemic, the AAP reversed its previous guidance on the importance of babies being able to read faces to fit in with the leftist push for masking. The organisation also took advice from teachers’ unions and pushed for schools to remain closed. Today, the AAP is busying itself issuing political statements on the conflict in the Middle East.
Parents didn’t wake up one day and decide to stop vaccinating their children without reason. They no longer trust groups that have proved themselves untrustworthy. Parents are fed up with falsehoods that made them wonder what else they’ve been lied to about. Moms and dads have had a front row seat to the politicisation of health policy over the last few years and have decided to opt out of taking any further guidance from these people until that trust can be restored.
When I speak to parents who no longer vaccinate their children, a common thread is that they just don’t believe what they are told anymore. These were normal people, following the rules, until abnormal policies were pushed on their families. Low trust in institutions is detrimental to societies. Maybe those institutions should work on fixing themselves so people will once again listen to what they have to say.
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SubscribeIf this is not the classic case of the pot calling the kettle black, I don’t know what is. After 4 years of suppressed Hunter Biden scams around the globe and money laundering, we have this before it even happens? Besides, isn’t seeking power and influence the main reason why people become involved in politics in the first place? It’s why it attracts only a certain type of person. Most honest folks wouldn’t last 8 hours in Washington.
I must have missed Fang’s article on the Clinton Foundation’s “charitable” endeavors.
Hey this is Lee Fang. You did miss it, maybe you didn’t look before you commented. I was the first to break many of the major Clinton Foundation foreign influence and corporate influence stories, including efforts by Morocco to use donations to the charity to curry influence.
I’ve also reported extensively about Chinese influence in American politics on both major political parties. I was the first to report Hunter Biden’s investments in a Chinese surveillance company and also broke the story of a Chinese billionaire buying the home of Obama’s ambassador to China and illegally funneling donations into a major SuperPAC. I am nonpartisan — I hold everyone accountable.
https://theintercept.com/2015/04/22/inside-morocco-clinton-influence-campaign/
https://theintercept.com/2017/06/02/hna-group-corruption-scaramucci-trump-jeb-bush-clinton-guo-wengui/
https://theintercept.com/2019/05/03/biden-son-china-business/
https://theintercept.com/2016/08/03/chinese-couple-million-dollar-donation-jeb-bush-super-pac/
a former Trump campaign staffer, who asked not to be named, told me.
What on earth does this mean? It should be clear by now that we’re sick and tired of this sort of comment. A campaign staffer. What does that mean? What does “former” mean, 2016, 2020, 2024 and why are they former? How close were they to decision making? Are they reliable or a total idiot. Do they have an axe to grind? Do they even exist?
Lee Fang is a highly respected independent journalist. This is what journalism does, use anonymous sources. Based on the credibility of the journalist, we can determine whether or not the sources are good. You seem very uninformed about how this works.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the source was Steve Bannon or Peter Navarro, or possibly even Lighthizer.
I’m well aware of anonymous sources and how they works, Your cheap shot is exactly that. The point is that the source was used to finish the piece and reflect what the writer was getting at, thereby giving his piece more credibility. It’s a pretty meaningless statement anyway. The interesting thing is that the anonymous quote has allowed you to fill in the gap with figures higher up in the food chain, thereby giving the quote more importance, when in fact it’s a statement with the inside knowledge of the doorman.
Are you the first person to put this information into the public domain? It is damned important and not what I would have expected from Trump.
No he’s not the first person to put this story into the public domain. There’s very little here to be concerned about. Wiles has done nothing illegal. There is no “story” in the story.
No surprise here. Just the beginning of what we can expect from the Democrats and all the hyenas in their camp. Obviously they are incapable of taking a good look at themselves, even though they’ve received a crushing and ignoble defeat. It’s not so much that they won’t look in the mirror as that they just don’t know how to do it. I’m sure we all know of someone like this. They’re actually crippled people who live with some patched-up idea of themselves to compensate for something gone wrong in their lives and they destroy everything around them in the process.
So governments shouldn’t be held to account by the press when hypocrisy or conflicts of interest occur? Or should it only happen when your preferred side aren’t in power?
So governments shouldn’t be held to account by the press when hypocrisy or conflicts of interest occur?
Your argument supposes that clients of a business enjoy perpetual devotion by owners of the business. Lobbying is a business, as is the practice of law. I suggest wait for acts, rather than support smears.
I don’t believe pointing out a potential conflict of interest in a woman just given a powerful government position is a smear personally. You’d be screaming blue murder if the opposition had something similar
Of course it’s a smear when it’s only a “potential” conflict. Are we now to be judged on what might happen in the future?
I take it you missed this part of the article: “John Kelly, a former Marine Corps. General, was an establishment figure who also spun through the revolving door and served on boards of several defence contractors. He later turned on Trump, accusing him of being a fascist who would govern as a dictator.”
Corrupt lobbyists and other political sellouts always return to the honeypot after leaving gov’t positions: see Scaramucci, Pence, etc. This woman sounds like a Republican version of the Podesta brothers.
If you mean having come from the corporate sector and having served her time as Chief of Staff she will then return to the corporate sector then yes you’re correct. But what’s unusual about that? From where do you think the government should recruit a Cabinet? Where would it find the people with the skills and experience?
You do have a point. Unfortunately all things media are now viewed with total distrust. We simply cannot trust what we read. Therefore we challenge everything. Stories will have to drop words like “presumably” for instance when trying to assert something they don’t seem to be able to prove, or stop including reasonably benign facts to give the piece more substance, as is done here with Nestle and Heinz. Just give us the facts then we’ll form our opinion, We don’t need others to do it.
NOW ties to China are an issue? Seriously? And how typical, the apocalyptic warning comes from an anonymous source. Perhaps this is all accurate but it also repeats the pattern that has led people to discount most media.
I think the media will continue to make it worse for themselves. It’s going to take a lot of work on the part of the media to turn Trump’s voters against him and in the process they’ll damage their reputation even more, all the while blaming Trump for their own demise.
Forget the anonymous source, do you not find her history extremely disturbing? And yes, most Trump supporters will consider her lengthy history of CCP company-lobbying to be an issue.
Having read the references and other stories I do not find her history “extremely disturbing”. Her history is very clear and available to the public. Nothing has been concealed. There is nothing illegal with companies lobbying the government. The company she is associated with operates legally as a consultancy to Chinese business and government. Wiles obviously has abilities that suit her new position. There may be moral considerations to be taken into account, but certainly not legal issues. Let’s see what eventuates before jumping to conclusions.
Ya. Not a good look at all. Ugh.
Oh what webs we weave as we plan to deceive
Ah but such are the ways of so called US Democracy now totally in the grip of lobbyists mainly from the Defense and Fossil Fuel Industries
A voting ballot paper in America is now only fit for hanging from your toilet roll holder
Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss!
Something I can see happening, and it’ll happen here in comments; most people who voted for Trump, more than likely, despise the Democrats and the media for their lies their deceptions and their policies. They won’t forget that in a long time. Because of that they’ll give Trump a lot of rope. They’ll ignore a lot of what the media might say about him, his cabinet and policies. The more the media try to pile in on the more his voters will ignore it. This is a total commitment both for Trump and against the left, which they associate with the Democrats.