Trump, vaccination, and the right to kill children

Andrew Koppelman

Does liberty mean a right to kill other people’s children, slowly and painfully?  It would, if the Trump Administration had its way.  It’s pressing states to allow broad vaccine exemptions as part of its larger campaign against settled medical practice.

The danger is clearest with measles. Children usually recover from it, albeit often with some permanent damage. But a 2016 California study found that when infants under a year old are infected, subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) – in which the virus lingers in the brain and slowly destroys it – develops in about one in 600 cases, far higher than the 1-in-100,000 figure doctors long cited. Long after the initial infection, the child becomes clumsy and forgetful, then experiences headaches, fevers, and seizures, loses motor control, and finally becomes bedridden and dies. There is no cure.

Babies can't be vaccinated on the standard schedule until 12 to 15 months old — earlier doses, at six months, are only given for travel to outbreak areas and don't count toward full protection. (Under the schedule revisions the Department of Health and Human Services just proposed, some of that timeline would push even later.) Until a child is protected, the only way to guard against SSPE is to keep them away from unvaccinated people. In Germany in 2000, an unvaccinated 11-year-old boy was taken to the pediatrician with a fever. He infected six children in the waiting room, including three babies. Two of them developed SSPE.  Natalie died in 2011 and Micha in 2013.

Measles is astoundingly contagious. You can catch it by entering a room two hours after an infected person left. The country has recorded more cases since early 2025 than in the previous 25 years combined, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. More than 70 percent of confirmed cases are children. The administration's anti-vaccine rhetoric is a principal driver, and if it gets its way, the unvaccinated share of the population will keep rising. Scale up that one-in-600 figure, and that's a lot of dead children.

I elaborate in a new column at USA Today, here.