The invaluable investigative news source ProPublica has a highly disturbing article about how crank RFK Jr’s; health agenda, backed by Trump, risks unleashing waves of childhood plagues that we thought we had ended for good. Much news coverage has focused on measles but there are a whole lot of other diseases that risk becoming widespread as well. Some of them had been absent for so long that doctors had never seen cases and thus had trouble identifying them in the sick children brought to them. The diseases include diphtheria, rubella, and polio among others.

The article starts with a doctor puzzling over the symptoms displayed by an infant.

The baby’s life was in danger, and Ratner needed to figure out why. He worried the culprit was bacterial meningitis, an infection of the membranes that protect the brain.

What came back on her lab tests was something out of the history books.

The infant’s meningitis was caused by invasive Haemophilus influenzae type b, or Hib, a type of bacteria that used to kill nearly 1,000 children a year in the U.S. A shot introduced in the late 1980s was so effective that Ratner, a veteran pediatric infectious disease doctor, was among the generations of physicians who had never seen a case. But the baby’s parents, Ratner learned, had chosen not to vaccinate her.

Disheartened, he told his colleagues, “This should be a never event.”

It wasn’t. The following year, Ratner treated another infant with Hib, then another, each of them unvaccinated. Two went home, but one had to be discharged to a rehabilitation facility. That 5-month-old boy had huge black pupils that didn’t respond to light, and he needed a ventilator to breathe. Ratner and his colleagues noted an “absence of brain stem reflexes,” indicating severe damage.

The U.S. government took a half century to build a vaccination system that shielded children from such a fate. Its success depended on two fundamental pillars: parents trusting in vaccines and children having access to them. Both are now in peril, thanks in no small part to the man steering America’s health policy.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who founded an antivaccine group and once likened the immunization of children to a holocaust, is transforming a government that long championed the lifesaving benefits of shots into one that spreads doubts about their safety here and abroad.

The article lists a whole slew of diseases that are either resurgent or risk being so as the US government turns away from robust vaccination programs that strongly encouraged people to have their children take the shots to becoming much more ambivalent and encouraging skepticism among the population, feeding people with the belief that their personal feelings matter more than the scientific consensus about what is best for the health of their children.

With many of these diseases, you cannot reverse the damage.

Even in places that offer highly advanced health care, doctors have felt impotent trying to undo the damage when these horrors return. Modern medicine can’t reverse paralysis from polio. Surgeons can intervene when a baby is born blind, deaf and with heart defects after being exposed to rubella in the womb, but the child is still likely to face a life shaped by disability.

ProPublica reviewed hundreds of studies on vaccines and outbreaks of the diseases they prevent and interviewed more than three dozen people who have worked on U.S. immunization programs here and abroad, dating back to the days of smallpox. Some had never spoken publicly about their experiences.

They shared a pit-of-the-stomach dread that American children will end up fighting for their lives against infections that have long been preventable.

The anti-vaccination fanatics have taken something that was utterly uncontroversial and made it into something sinister.

Nearly two centuries later, in the throes of the Cold War, CDC scientists teamed up with their counterparts from America’s archenemy, the Soviet Union, to wipe smallpox from the planet. They worked through the World Health Organization to track the virus in cities, rainforests and war zones, vaccinating those at risk. Four U.S. presidents, Democrats and Republicans, backed the work until the disease that had haunted humans since the days of the pharaohs was gone.

Vaccines, for decades, weren’t politically divisive. They were so uncontroversial that McDonald’s restaurants in the 1990s put the childhood immunization schedule on their tray liners.

When the nation’s immunization program was in trouble in the 1980s, Republicans and Democrats stepped in to save it.

But that is no more. The Trump cult in their Republican party is so afraid of him that they are no longer defending vaccinations, And in RFK Jr the fanatics have found a fellow fanatic willing to risk the health and lives of generations of children. Even polio vaccinations are under review.

As is said among the vaccine community, let down your guard and the diseases will return. The article goes on to describe other diseases making a resurgence. The article looked at how Russia and Japan had to work hard to fight back once lowered vaccination rates due to mistrust triggered new outbreaks. Trump and RFK Jr have also falsely claimed that there is a link between vaccines and autism.

Another troubling area is that the government has stopped funding a global vaccine program. That means the people in other countries are now more likely to get preventable diseases and, in these days of easy international travel, can become vectors and transmit it to other countries.

I cannot do justice to the wide scope of the article’s coverage of the many diseases that vaccines have suppressed across the globe but now are coming back because of the misinformation spread by RFK Jr and Trump and their cult followers.

The problem is spreading beyond vaccine denialism. Some parents are now denying their newborns other care that used to be routine.

One day at an Idaho hospital, half the newborns Dr. Tom Patterson saw didn’t get the vitamin K shots that have been given to babies for decades to prevent potentially deadly bleeding. On another recent day, more than a quarter didn’t get the shot. Their parents wouldn’t allow it.

“When you look at a child who’s innocent and vulnerable — and a simple intervention that’s been done since 1961 is refused — knowing that baby’s going out into the world is super worrisome to me,” said Patterson, who’s been a pediatrician for nearly three decades.

Doctors across the nation are alarmed that skepticism fueled by rising anti-science sentiment and medical mistrust is increasingly reaching beyond vaccines to other proven, routine, preventive care for babies.

A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which analyzed more than 5 million births nationwide, found that refusals of vitamin K shots nearly doubled between 2017 and 2024, from 2.9% to 5.2%. Other research suggests that parents who decline vitamin K shots are much more likely to refuse getting their newborns the hepatitis B vaccine and an eye ointment to prevent potentially blinding infections. Rates for that vaccination at birth dropped in recent years, and doctors confirm that more parents are refusing the eye medication.

There are many things that the Trump gang have done that make me furious because of the cruelty on display. But the battle waged by them against vaccines is something that is absolutely unforgivable because it is going to ruin the lives of so many children. The success of vaccines against a wide spectrum of childhood diseases can be pointed to as one of the great successes of modern medicine, achieved as a result of a united effort of science, public health, and public policy. It is a tragedy that those hard won successes are being destroyed because of reckless and dangerously ignorant people getting into power.