Proving once again that anti-vax quack Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a threat to public health, confirmed measles cases in the United States have hit a 33-year high.

It’s even worse since it’s been a quarter century since the deadly disease was declared completely eradicated in the country. But no more.

The nearly 1,300 confirmed cases across 38 states and D.C. are likely only a fraction of total numbers, given just how infectious the virus is. Meanwhile, RFK Jr., tasked with safeguarding the health of people around the country, has done practically as much or more than anyone else to bring measles back, both in his long career as a prominent anti-vaxxer peddling falsehoods for profit through his ill-fated current position atop the nation’s health infrastructure.

There’s a tendency among Kennedy and the Make America Healthy Again folks to paint the spread of these infectious diseases as simply something that happens naturally, and which we should therefore just let play out. Pathogens certainly did emerge from nature and have long been part of our environment, but that doesn’t make them something inherent to our lives in the same way that we wouldn’t any longer consider it a fact of life for people to be eaten by animals or starving from crop failures, as our pre-scientific ancestors did.

In fact, these disease-ridden forebears would be floored that people in our society, and especially those in charge, would actually choose to re-introduce what they considered horrible problems since solved. How short are the memories that vaccine hesitancy and a repudiation of medical science are gaining steam. In the days before vaccines, smallpox and polio and measles killed.

For years, American parents have been spared having to watch their kids die of the measles; in fact, up until this year, none had so in this country for a decade. But, unfortunately, there will be more as the extraordinarily virulent pathogen continues to tear around the country.

It’s sad to think that we are doomed to relearn lessons forgotten, but we are at a crucial point now where it’s possible to avoid this fate. The spread of measles is still controllable with close coordination and aggressive intervention by a federal government that understands the stakes and the level of risk.

Tragically, it doesn’t seem like we are going to have one anytime soon, so the next best thing will have to be to force federal authorities to act. This week, a group of major medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Physicians filed a lawsuit in Boston Federal Court, making the case that recommendations issued by RFK‘s handpicked new vaccine advisory panel — which replaced an existing panel of experts all fired by the professional anti-vaccine agitator— were void and his actions unlawful.

Their arguments centered on new recommendations around upcoming COVID boosters, but their efforts could just as well extend to other vaccines and therapeutics, given that Bobby Kennedy seems perfectly willing and able to target them all. This is not a game; until the kooks and zealots rampaging over the public health infrastructure are constrained, many people could die.

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