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...
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...
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.
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?
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.).