First, here are the annual cases of measles (which is a reportable disease) from 2000 through 2025:

I bring this up because of a graphic Fox News ran:

They might have picked 2020 and not 2024 is because that would be part of the larger strategy of blaming Biden (e.g., after four years of Biden, look at how bad it is!) for, well, everything. Never mind that 2020 measles cases were the lowest they had been in a quarter century for a very obvious reason: the same peak pandemic precautions that protected against COVID also are effective against other respiratory viruses like measles. And 2019 was not a good year*.

Yet Fox News, with an elderly viewership, realizes that HHS Secretary and Plaguelord Kennedy’s anti-vaccinationism is a political problem, so they aired an interview with an expert who claimed that the problem is due to anti-vaxxers (which is true), but Biden’s mishandling of vaccination contributed to poor MMR vaccine uptake overall. Of course, Fox News itself in 2021 played a significant role in encouraging anti-vaccination attitudes:

We have good evidence that it was a manufactured anti-COVID vaxx campaign, promulgated in no small part by Tucker Carlson (who wanted to boost his ratings). In April 2021, Fox News, led by Tucker Carlson, started Just Asking Questions about the COVID vaccine, and yes, there was a significant decrease in vaccine uptake during Carlson’s anti-vaccine campaign. Meanwhile, professional anti-vaxxers like current HHS Secretary Kennedy piled on to Fox News’ coverage.

This wasn’t ‘polarization’ per se, it was an intentional propaganda campaign, one that was so obviously harmful, even some people at Fox News were bothered by it. ‘Polarization’ on vaccination isn’t like the earth’s magnetosphere, it’s the result of specific choices by specific people and institutions. And those players need to be named.

The tragedy of measles outbreaks is that they are entirely self-inflicted–they are the result of MMR vaccine refusal. Hopefully, we will have a return to sane governance before measles really takes off.

*The pattern is usually to compare the economy in 2019 to 2025, and then blame Biden, but, for obvious reasons, 2020 had vastly fewer measles cases than 2019.