| As we near the end of 2025, I am asking myself what the worst thing that the Trump administration did was. There were plenty of actions I found appalling as a constitutional law scholar, not to mention the unyielding cruelty of this Administration, no matter what it does, the hubris of the Epstein cover-up, and the self-righteous Christian Nationalist blather. It is an irritating Administration, that’s for sure. | | The stories that are haunting me the most, though, are the preventable deaths of unvaccinated infants and children. In 2025, we witnessed the first two measles deaths of unvaccinated children in a decade in the United States. This Administration first responded by encouraging MMR vaccination; later, anti-vaxxer and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said that the government should be paying more attention to autism and diabetes than to those diseases that can be stopped by vaccines. More recently, as I discuss below, he has insisted on linking autism to the MMR vaccine. In the same year, three unvaccinated infants died in Kentucky of whooping cough (pertussis). Neither they nor their mothers were vaccinated, though science recommends it for both, as this memo from the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services notes. This was not a tragedy RFK Jr. chose to acknowledge, of course, because it highlights the natural end result of his longtime advocacy against vaccines and President Trump’s choice to place him at the helm of this country’s health: the deaths of children. | | RFK Jr. and his co-conspirators in endangering children, MAHA, have ushered in an era of not just fervid vaccine ignorance and distrust, but child deaths generated by a lack of vaccination. The cause and effect are clear, and they must embrace the inevitable results of their public advocacy and now power—needless suffering and death. These were not terrible accidents but rather predictable results of resolutely rejecting solid science. Indeed, his actions are so reckless that I am waiting for parents to sue the Trump administration for misleading them into vaccine denial for their deceased children. Of course, children aren’t the only victims of the anti-vaccine movement. Pregnant women and elderly people are particularly susceptible when herd immunity declines; they should also be able to hold this Administration accountable for its failure to protect the vulnerable despite long-settled, evidence-based science. | | Andrew Wakefield, the father of vaccine hesitancy, is the British doctor who published a misleading 1998 article in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, asserting that the MMR vaccine causes autism. He’s no longer a doctor, and in 2010, The Lancetretracted the paper because it’s not true. No scientist has shown such a link in the meantime; to the contrary, the evidence shows that the MMR vaccine is safe and necessary to avoid child and community suffering and deaths. Over the years, Hollywood actress Jenny McCarthy proudly parroted the same false claim, along with others. This anti-science and anti-children’s health movement paved the way for a 2014-15 measles outbreak in Disneyland that led California to do what every state needs to do: it eliminated the philosophical and religious exemptions to mandated childhood vaccines. | | Yet, the lie will not die. Even after two children died of measles, RFK Jr. forced the CDC to release the following false narrative: “The claim 'vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” That is baloney that will dissuade parents from protecting their children. | | RFK Jr’s brand of vaccine denial is building a foundation for an increasing number of preventable child fatalities. In this culture, states are taking tragic risks. Idaho eliminated its vaccine mandates in 2025, while Florida is taking steps in the same direction despite many doctors’ objections. It is an extraordinary step for Florida to take, given its substantial population of older adults and the fact that elderly people are so vulnerable to disease, including measles, for those vaccinated decades ago. Imagine the impact of a fast-spreading measles or whooping cough outbreak in the Sunshine State. | | Toxic religious liberty has also derailed the movement toward evidence-based vaccine requirements that started in California when it eliminated the religious and philosophical exemptions to vaccine mandates. The two safest states in the country for vaccine-preventable illnesses, Mississippi and West Virginia, may well squander herd immunity and healthy children for extreme religious liberty. A federal district court in 2023 held that Mississippi must honor religious exemption requests, leading the state to fall from one of the highest vaccination rates and lowest disease rates in the United States to below the national average. A West Virginia judge also mandated religious exemptions, but the state Supreme Court has stayed the ruling for now. They have a lot to learn from Mississippi’s experience. It’s a simple choice: vaccine “choice” or widespread illness and even death. | | This Administration is also giving cover to the deadly idea that childhood vaccines should be a matter of “parental choice” and not mandate. That’s like saying seatbelt and car seat mandates for infants and children should be tossed. In fact, it has long been documented that seatbelts and car seats save lives as you can see here and here. Car restraints for children save hundreds of lives each year. Children’s lives are constitutionally protected from parental malfeasance, which is why states can legitimately require parents to strap in their kids—as well as vaccinate them. | | The Trump administration spends so much effort protecting the potential lives of fetuses (which they call “unborn children”), but it is failing miserably to protect infants facing unacceptable risk when unvaccinated. Children are not property. They have a right to live under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments that outweighs parental and government decisions that are recklessly fatal. It is a good time to remember the eloquent words of Justice Wiley Rutledge in Prince v. Massachusetts: “Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves. But it does not follow they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children before they have reached the age of full and legal discretion when they can make that choice for themselves.” That’s called a right to an open future, and this Administration’s RFK Jr. is making it his business to martyr children to his half-baked ideas. That, in my book, is a culture of death, not health. |
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