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.