Vaccinations: Who Needs Them?
According to the most recent information available on the CDC.gov website, “As of March 27, 2025, a total of 483 confirmed measles cases were reported by 20 jurisdictions: Alaska, California, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York City, New York State, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, and Washington”. Who should be concerned, and why?
First, Trump and Musk are eliminating jobs in the CDC and the NIH at alarming rates. These people have 20 twenty years or more of critical knowledge on diseases, how they spread, how they mutate, and how to keep them under control. Knowing how diseases and bacteria behave is a vital, ongoing fight. This critical scientific knowledge requires monitoring and testing.
Second, in the case of measles, the more cases in an environment, the more opportunity the disease has to mutate, change, and adapt, making it even more deadly. In fact, measles can damage the body’s immune system, making people much more susceptible to many other dangerous and possibly life-threatening diseases and infections for many years to come. Children whose parents avoid the measles vaccine are making very real, life-threatening decisions.
Third, kids aren’t the only ones who need to be vaccinated. Careful monitoring of the measles has now shown us that based on when adults received their MMR vaccinations, they might need to get a measles vaccine to protect themselves from the newly re-entering disease (see above for a list of those 20 jurisdictions reporting outbreaks). Anyone who was vaccinated on or before 1968 should talk to their doctor about getting re-vaccinated, and those traveling abroad should protect themselves with a vaccine.
Diseases like measles, polio, smallpox, and tuberculosis still exist, and we need to vaccinate our children (and even ourselves again if necessary) to avoid multiple deadly outbreaks. Likewise, we need to keep the knowledgeable scientists and disease experts on the case, monitoring, testing, and recording outbreaks. Scientists aren’t the enemy — stupidity and diseases are.