Measles is at its highest rate in 30 years. Whooping cough deaths are rising. Flu and tetanus are killing more Americans than they were a few years ago. Donald Trump's response to all of this, according to the Wall Street Journal, is to push Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to cut vaccines even faster.
The Scoreboard Nobody Wanted
Let's just put the numbers on the table first, because they matter. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Trump has been pressuring his health secretary to be more aggressive about cutting vaccines from the US immunization schedule. Kennedy, who spent decades as one of the most prominent anti-vaccine voices in the country, apparently is not moving fast enough for the president.
Kennedy already made history recently by slashing the routine childhood immunization schedule in what has been described as an unprecedented move. No health secretary had done anything like it before. Experts were alarmed. The public health establishment sounded every available alarm. Trump, apparently, looked at all of that and said: more.
Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, measles cases in the United States have surged to the highest level seen in 30 years. Deaths from whooping cough, flu, and tetanus have all climbed in recent years. These are diseases we had largely beaten. We had the receipts. We had the vaccines. And we are watching them come back in real time.
This Is Not a Philosophical Debate Anymore
There is a version of this conversation that is abstract. Questions about vaccine mandates, parental choice, the role of government in medicine. Fine. Democracies have always fought over that stuff.
This is not that version. This is a sitting president pushing his health secretary to remove more vaccines from the childhood schedule while children are actively catching measles again. The cause and the effect are no longer separated by any meaningful gap. You can watch them happen in sequence, in the same news cycle.
Trump has a long and well-documented record of anti-vaccine statements going back years, so none of this should surprise anyone who was paying attention. What's different now is that he has the keys to the entire federal public health apparatus, and he has installed a man who shares his priors at the top of it. The consequences of those priors are now showing up in hospital data.
Meanwhile, Elsewhere in the Chaos
If you were hoping the rest of the news cycle would offer some relief, Tuesday was not your day. The US military intercepted an Iranian ballistic missile barrage aimed at American forces in the Middle East, according to US Central Command, which said every missile launched was knocked down. Washington called it "an attempted surprise attack" by Tehran. US and Saudi forces then struck sites in Iraq used by Tehran-backed militias to launch attacks.
This happened while Benjamin Netanyahu was sitting in the White House, where he had what the Israeli prime minister described as an "excellent" meeting with Trump. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called it "positive and productive." Iran chose that specific moment to launch missiles at American troops, which is one way to make your feelings about a meeting known.
Also on Trump's Tuesday schedule: a separate sit-down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is still asking for more air defense firepower and who said diplomatic efforts need to be "reinvigorated." Two wars, two leaders, one afternoon. The White House is running quite the hospitality program right now.
The Week's Other Disasters, Ranked by How Depressing They Are
A 6.8-magnitude earthquake struck southern Japan on Tuesday, killing at least 13 people and injuring hundreds more, according to the Guardian. Japan mobilized 3,600 military personnel for disaster relief and sent 20 aircraft to assess the damage. The Japan Meteorological Agency warned that hard-hit areas remain at risk of further strong quakes and landslides for about a week. The prime minister called it a race against time.
The Federal Communications Commission announced a ban on humanoid robots from China, citing what it called "unacceptable risks" to national security. The FCC said these robots collect data that could be used to surveil Americans or allow foreign actors to, and this is a real thing an American government agency wrote, "remotely commandeer the robots." The ban also covers connected power inverters used in renewable energy systems.
And several American schools, the Guardian reports, are moving to install pepper-spraying drones as part of their response plans for school shooting attacks. Let that one sit for a second. The solution we landed on, as a society, for children being shot at school is to add drones that spray pepper at them. This is where we are.
The Senate Keeps Stocking the Pond
The US Senate voted to confirm Jay Clayton as director of national intelligence, giving Trump another loyalist in a critical intelligence role. Clayton, a former Wall Street regulator, will now oversee the nation's intelligence apparatus. The Senate has been confirming Trump's nominees with the enthusiasm of people who have decided consequences are someone else's problem.
Elsewhere in American diplomacy, US diplomats walked out of a United Nations meeting after France criticized the United States' human rights record under the Trump administration. France. A country the US has ribbed about war records since approximately 1940. The French brought receipts to a UN session and American diplomats decided they'd rather leave than sit through it. Make of that what you will.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that what is happening with vaccines is a good-faith policy disagreement. A robust national conversation about childhood medicine. A president listening to concerned parents. That is the framing being offered, and it is garbage. What the Wall Street Journal is actually describing is a president who watched measles come roaring back, watched whooping cough start killing people again, and his reaction was to call his health secretary and say you're not cutting fast enough. That is not a policy position. That is something else entirely.
The thing about public health is that the feedback loop is real and it is merciless. You remove a vaccine from the schedule, and a year or two later, you start seeing the disease. We know this. Scientists know this. Every doctor who went to medical school knows this. The data from this very moment knows this. Measles at a 30-year high is not a coincidence that arrived alongside the most aggressive anti-vaccine administration in American history. It is the direct, predictable, entirely foreseeable result.
So no, this story does not end with a call for unity or a note about how democracy is resilient or how we can turn this around if we just show up and vote. Children are getting measles again. The president wants more of the same. The health secretary is legally obligated to follow his lead. Whatever you were doing today, that is what is happening while you do it.
