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Comment by buellerbueller | Hacker News Reader

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Historically, these outbreaks have nothing to do with "MAHA"/RFK types. It's religious fundamentalist groups that lack herd immunity (because nobody in the community is vaccinated) every time.

And yet, the parent of one such child who died of measles because of being unvaccinated went on video for Children’s Health Defense (RFK's anti-vaccine group) to claim how vaccines are bad and measles are good.

The claim that these the religious fundamentalist groups have nothing to do with anti-vaccine propaganda inflicted by MAHA types is disingenuous or simply poorly informed.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/anti-vaccine-infl...

Please go ahead and find me a transmission chain of any of these nearly eradicated infectious diseases that went through someone involved in MAHA or Children's Health Defense. If you go looking, you will find that every single outbreak of Measles, Polio, or any similar disease in North America goes through a fundamentalist religious community. The Wakefield/RFK groups are really not large or tightly-connected enough to do this.

What you can blame RFK for (and what you should blame him for) is cutting funding to identify these possible transmission events and intercept them. This is an area where the Trump admin made severe cuts, on the back of RFK's ideological bent against the concept of infectious disease and the "government efficiency" wave. As a result, responses to outbreaks in these religious communities are much, much slower. It is not a "MAHA wave" that is causing outbreaks like this, it's the loss of funding.

RFKjr and the 2019 Samoa measles outbreak comes to mind where he went to Samoa to boost vaccine hesitancy after some kids died due to a mistakenly adulterated vaccination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Samoa_measles_outbreak

This kind of messaging is why Samoa had 30% vaccination rate while nearby islands had 99% vaccination when measles infected the island later that same year.

I don’t see how you can dismiss RFKjr’s messaging. Are you claiming he has no impact on public opinion?

Sorry, can you point to where Samoa is on a map of North America?

The messaging gets a few thousand kooks riled up, and it's been going back decades to the Wakefield study and all the random kooks who think their child got autism from a vaccine. RFK is not new. His message is marginally more popular in the US, but it is not causing a huge wave of vaccine hesitancy.

Places like Samoa have additional problems with vaccination in that the standard of care isn't that high and sometimes those errors cause people to avoid care. In the Samoa case you cited there, the inciting incident involved two kids dying due to a nurse's error which wasn't investigated. If getting a vaccine involves some risk of getting poisoned by an incompetent nurse, you might also think twice about getting a vaccine. This is very different than the RFK situation of yelling about things that don't happen (vaccines causing autism, birth defects, etc.).

These religious fundamentalist groups have always existed, yet Canada and other places eliminated measles. I wonder what changed?

Oh yeah, the spread of misinformation on the internet.

What changed was less funding to the agencies that surveil for disease spread so they can intercept outbreaks. The US CDC funded these programs all over the world.

And still did until this year. American vaccine hesitancy has grown since long before even covid.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/data-investigatio...

Just stop sanewashing this.

What changed was that they were free-riders on the rest of the population and one day the rest of the population no longer met the threshold.

One could say it is because of the spread of misinformation and that might be the proximate cause.

But if a drug addict periodically overdoses and needs naloxone, and one day a supply chain issue makes it hard to access and he dies, did the supply chain kill him or his drug addiction? Perhaps monocausal explanations are insufficient.

It's a little hard to believe that people who famously don't use computers were infected by an "misinformation", a rather loathsome neologism. There was famously a really serious outbreak in the NYC Orthodox community from 1989 to about 1991. Unvaccinated communities are a sort of immunological tinder box, and you never know when a stray spark might land.

This is the result of a failure of public health to reach out to these religious communities in effective ways for decades.

That stray spark’s survival is heavily influenced by the herd immunity of the rest of the population.

Put another way if the overall population sees an average of 0.5 or 0.95 infections per case there’s zero chance of a huge outbreak. But odds of a case making it to a vulnerable population is wildly higher in the second case.

> There was famously a really serious outbreak in the NYC Orthodox community from 1989 to about 1991.

They never really stopped, it's been every few years since then: https://forward.com/news/417390/measles-is-hitting-ultra-ort...

The Amish are/were undervaccinated but it wasn't due to religious objections. It just seems uncommon in communities to see a dr, unless it's needed: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/ohio-amish-reconsider-va... It's also hard to get an official count (I've seen estimates below 20% vs almost 90% for non-amish communities in same state, but then you read stuff like this which suggests even the old older is above 80% https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/128... ) since these communities are grandfathered into their own healthcare systems and often exempt from the normal federal welfare systems: https://www.ssa.gov/faqs/en/questions/KA-02411.html

I'm not sure about Mennonites. One of their communities writes about it and seems to suggest only 1 of the 40 or so communities is hardliners against vaccination. But I also note this is written in a really neutral way (could be to placate government, dunno): https://www.mennoniteusa.org/measles/

I think the point was, it's not limited to those isolated groups anymore.

It mostly is limited to people in those groups or people in contact with them. [1] The big hot spot in Alberta is the Mennonite community.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-mexican-menno...

They don't use computers but they turned up for trump so they are definitely falling for misinformation somewhere

It's not the amish whose vaccination status changed. It's the maha fools who fell for vaccine misinformation whose vax status did.

But it's the Mennonites who were the source and primary locus of the outbreak, not some MAHA dummies.

Alberta now accounts for 38% of the cases

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-measles-statu...

And 12% of the population for context.

Alberta -- just AB -- had more cases than the entire US for some time

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