You don't think RFK has anything to do with it?

He is amplifying the issue, but you're right, Trump is a symptom of the underlying problem. The problem is that internet gave these idiots a platform to mislead people.

Back in the early 90s this wasn't much of a problem. Childhood vaccine requirements weren't some hot-button topic then. Most people would just get them when faced with the requirement. Most opposition was isolated to people who were otherwise contrarians already.

The difference now is that the internet is full of these isolated contrarians who are now influencing gullible people who don't know who to trust.

"Evidence" requires citations.

You are willfully deluding yourself if you believe that. He put an anti-vax idiot as head of HHS. How is that "nothing"?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/10/trump-vaccin...

"The order recommends that all shots be given at separate medical visits, a frequent point Trump has made despite the safety, ease and lower costs of giving vaccines together."

'“Together, there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal,” Trump said of the MMR vaccine at the signing of the order on Monday.'

'Asked if he had evidence that the combined MMR vaccine was “lethal”, Trump said: “No. What I’ve heard is that there are some people who say it is that way.”'

Antivax fundamentally has its contemporary roots in Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent anti-MMR campaign.

So directing by executive order and by his own admission without evidence that the MMR vaccine be split up into separate shots is, very clearly, an antivax action. This is the first victory that Wakefield (a man who had a patent on a single measles vaccine!) wanted, and RFK Jr was pursuing.

But this is Trump saying this and signing it. So as of yesterday, it now has everything to do with Trump, sorry. He has handed the anti-MMR movement its ultimate victory and in so doing validated the entire antivax worldview.

It has a lot to do with him. He doesn't actually have an opinion on any policy issue. For various political reasons, Trump decided to let RFK dictate public health policy according to his extremely delusional ideas. Yes, there was an antivax movement in this country for many years, just as there has been misogyny, racism, and transphobia. Trump has normalized and supercharged all of these moronic and dangerous ideas.

I have not been following measles in Canada, so I can't address that.

Trump is trying to hang Fauci. That goes in the completely opposite direction of promoting the trust of medical institutions in general society, and it's trust that will get people back to vaccinating themselves and their children.

Right, because tapping one of the world's biggest vaccine truthers to run the Department of HHS and then proceed to link autism with vaccines and change the recommended MMR vaccine scheduling for children has absolutely no impact on anyone.

I can't help but feel this is ragebait or a bot.

>> Canada is doing even worse then us when it comes to measles

Not in Canada but unfortunately US nonsense spreads globally pretty quickly these days. The amount of Trump support in the UK is both bizarre and surprising. When someone with the worlds largest megaphone lies about vaccines, unfortunately people everywhere listen.

>I'm not a trump fan, but the antivax train has nothing to do with him.

Well not nothing. But it predates him and he adopted the movement early in his political career. When I was in high school (2004-8) antivax sentiment was generally associated with liberal Democrats in places like Marin County. This was a favorite retort of conservatives when confronted with their own backwardness on scientific understanding of evolution and climate change. In 2015 Trump began courting the anti-vaccine crowd and the political valence of that flavor of woo-woo nonsense flipped seemingly overnight. It was surreal to see it happen in real time. By 2020 he had lost control of the monster he helped create and the crowd booed him when he said they should get the Covid vaccine.

He was literally spreading FUD about vaccines today. And the measles stuff has got so bad RFK had to mildy backtrack on his previous antivax statements in recent interviews.

From today:

Both Trump and Kennedy made repeated mentions of autism throughout the order signing, emphasizing a scientifically unproven link between vaccines and the condition. Dozens of studies show no link between the two.

“Today we’re proud to officially announce the United States of America’s gold standard childhood vaccination recommendations. That has to do with many subjects including autism in particular,” Trump said at the beginning of the order signing.

“I’ve seen proof of it, where they have a vaccination where it looks like the size of a bottle of soda, poured into a little child’s body and bad things happen in too many cases,” Trump later said on breaking up each shot into an individual medical visit, before adding: “This is an explosion, it’s an epidemic,” in an apparent reference to autism.

[dead]

Given the amount of cultural influence the USA has and the universal nature of the internet it seems likely to me that global anti-vax sentiment could have started with the USA.

Contemporary pharmaceutical companies, as well as contemporary government and private health institutions are my enemy. I would rather die than live using their products and services.

When more ethical entities take over their business I will gladly start using them once again, as I did back in the day before they turned evil.

I am very prepared to get downvoted for bringing this up - but I'm not convinced that the "anti-vax movement" most people think of is truly to blame (that is, crazy people who think it gives you autism or whatever).

At least in my area, there are pockets of (relatively) new immigrants that have MMR vaccination rates at around 30% (that's very low, much lower than the anti-vaxxer population could account for imo), and the reasons for that have nothing to do with MAGA/MAHA as far as I can tell.

It's an entirely different problem (that needs solving), and pretending that this is simply the by-product of uneducated crazies on the internet feels like it's over indexing on a loud and flashy but ultimately small part of the problem.

Anti-vaxxing goes back literally centuries, but the internet definitely made it a THING.

Here [1] is a montage of some of the public messaging around the COVID vaccines. [1] It was quite simply dishonest. That, paired alongside the effort to force people to take the shots, completely destroyed public trust on a level that will take many decades to repair. Generalized vaccine skepticism follows naturally from that.

I'm certainly a part of that group. For instance I ended up doing extensive research on e.g. MMR before deciding to vaccinate my kids for it. If this were a decade ago, I almost certainly would have done it without a second thought, just as I took all recommended vaccines before traveling without a second thought. So I'm obviously not anti-vaccine in the least, but I no longer trust public messaging on the topic.

It was just another (of the increasingly endless) examples of governments/companies pursuing short-term interests while ignoring long-term consequences. When it comes to what people put in their bodies, trust is more important than literally anything else.

[1] - https://xcancel.com/ITGuy1959/status/1581034815700488192

[flagged]