This article was originally published to Watchdog Weekly. Read it here.
It has taken the Trump administration just six months to transform a Spartanburg County, South Carolina outbreak into our nation’s largest measles event in 30 years. The outbreak, which started as a handful of infections identified last October, is now a full blown viral threat across South Carolina.
As of writing, the state’s public health department has confirmed 876 cases, 96% of which occurred in Spartanburg County.
To put this health emergency into perspective, the case count in South Carolina has already surpassed the 762 total confirmed infections during last year’s West Texas outbreak. That crisis, which left 99 people hospitalized and killed two children, was a flashpoint in a year defined by a historic measles spread under Trump.
And while the West Texas outbreak was largely confined to Mennonite communities, health officials in South Carolina have identified active measles circulation in skating rinks, grocery stores, and restaurants.
These aren’t just close contacts getting sick; we are now seeing hundreds of cases of measles across a single county.
The emphasis on mass vaccination during the Measles Eradication Campaign of 1967 reduced the national infections by 90% in just two years. And by 2000, the U.S. had functionally “eliminated” measles. With >95% of Americans vaccinated against the disease, collective immunity had rendered large outbreaks a rarity.
The ongoing outbreak in South Carolina risks stripping the US of its official measles elimination status—a designation that protects our trade, travel, and economic security.
Yet Trump administration health officials have dismissed this outbreak as simply the “cost of doing business.” According to Deputy CDC Director Ralph Abraham, making measles endemic again is an exercise of “personal freedom” for “communities that choose to be unvaccinated.”
But, the resurgence of the world’s most contagious disease wasn’t inevitable. Shuttered schools and crowded hospitals across South Carolina are a direct consequence of Trump 2.0’s crusade efforts to codify vaccine skepticism into national policy.
Coercing States To Expand Vaccine Exemptions
HHS Secretary RFK Jr. is weaponizing the Vaccines for Children (VFC) program—a critical funding stream responsible for vaccinating half our nation’s poorest youth—against state-level vaccine mandates.
In other words, RFK Jr. is holding South Carolina ransom to the tune of $76 million —the amount the CDC provides for the hundreds of thousands of Medicaid-enrolled children and other uninsured youth across the state. A flurry of anti-vax actions last December outlined the Health Secretary’s plan of attack:
- The Threat: The administration has signaled that VFC funding is contingent on states’ respect for so-called “parent’s rights.” In practice, this means pressuring states to broaden their interpretation of religious and philosophical exemptions.
- The Enforcement: HHS’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has begun investigating schools that strictly scrutinize exemption requests, framing standard public health enforcement as an end run around parental consent.
- The Result: School administrators, fearful of losing federal funding or facing federal civil rights investigations, have stopped challenging dubious claims for exemptions. The outbreak of infections at the Global Academy of South Carolina—a public school where only 21% of its students are fully vaccinated–is the direct result of this permissive environment.
This assault on state vaccination laws is within a broader assault on the national vaccine policy more broadly.
Last December, under the guise of alignment with “peer nations,” Trump directed HHS to alter the U.S. vaccine schedule. Acting CDC Director Jim O’Neill, a Peter Thiel associate with no medical background, has reclassified inoculation against hepatitis and rotavirus from universal federal recommendations to “shared clinical decision-making.” This bureaucratic sleight of hand strips states of the federal guidance they rely on to enforce school entry requirements.
We shouldn’t be surprised that such anti-vaccine policy is yielding pro-disease outcomes. This is exactly what happens when dubious notions of personal liberty supersede any real effort towards collective immunity.
Like the DOGE-brand “efficiency” I wrote about last in last week’s newsletter, or the corporate technobabble my colleague Dylan Gyauch-Lewis recently called out in Hackwatch, MAHA’s “personal freedom” defense is an attempt to run cover for efforts to hollow out the administrative state.
But the children filling Spartanburg’s pediatric ICUs, struggling to breathe through pneumonia, or suffering from encephalitis-induced brain swelling, aren’t any freer for their suffering.
Unmitigated measles outbreaks across the U.S.—from ICE detention centers to university campuses—are not the “cost” of freedom. It’s the consequence of an administration simply choosing to prevent prevention.
A competent opposition party would not sit idly by as measles regains a foothold in our country. If outbreaks such as this are bound to become regular occurrences, then the people shaping these policies must be regularly hounded to the halls of Congress to explain their complete disregard for American families and children. And if the way to make that happen is the official party being provocative across all communications channels with an eye toward activating, say, parents and grandparents to fight for their progeny’s future…maybe that is a thing that can be done, rather than (or in addition to!) spammy fundraising text messages?
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