Medical Fan Fiction, National Consequences, and What Happens When We Lose the Shared Shield

Measles, declining vaccination rates, and the revival of preventable disease

They call it “Make America Healthy Again.” It is a beautiful promise, it is also a lie you can print on a hat. Because if you truly wanted a healthier country, you would start with the boring miracles that already work. You would protect clean water, you would make prenatal care easy to get, you would fund clinics and nurses and school counselors, you would make sure every kid can eat breakfast, and you would do the unglamorous work that saves lives quietly.

Instead, we are living through the age of health as performance. Health as a political costume, as a wink, and a conspiracy, and a viral clip. And the cost is not abstract, the cost is counted in fevers, quarantines, frightened parents, and children who cannot breathe comfortably in a world that used to be safer. In 2026, the United States has already reported hundreds of measles cases by mid-February. Measles is not a mysterious new disease; it is a disease we know how to stop. We stop it by keeping vaccination coverage high enough that the virus has nowhere to land, nowhere to spread, nowhere to turn a school hallway into a chain reaction.

But the floor is dropping out from under us. Kindergarten vaccination coverage has declined in recent years, numbers like that sound small until you remember what they represent. They represent classrooms, birthday parties, and toddlers climbing monkey bars with Band Aids on their knees and no idea what an airborne virus is, because they should not have to.

Measles does not negotiate. It does not care about your political identity, about your memes, about whether a man with a microphone told you to trust your instincts. A person with measles can be contagious before they even know they are sick. That means you can carry it into a grocery store, into a school, into a church, into a pediatric waiting room, and you can do it before you even know what is happening. This is why the “Make America Healthy Again” movement is not just annoying. It is dangerous.

It sells a feeling, the feeling that you are brave for doubting. The feeling is that every expert is corrupt, every institution is lying, and every public health warning is some kind of manipulation. It turns uncertainty into identity, suspicion into community, and slowly, like water wearing away stone, it turns protections into optional choices.

Now here is the part that should make anyone with a pulse go quiet. When vaccination levels slip, the harm does not land only on the people who decided to gamble. It lands on the people who cannot consent to the gamble. Newborns who are too young to be fully vaccinated, kids with cancer who cannot risk certain vaccines, people whose immune systems are not strong enough to fight what everyone else can handle. They live among us, and they live because we built a shared shield. That shared shield is what health looks like. Not a slogan, not a podcast, and not a fog machine masquerading as a flashlight in a suit saying, “Many people are saying,” as if germs pause to check polling.

Public health officials have warned for years that measles is most likely to spread where vaccination coverage is low, and that rising global measles activity increases the odds of the virus being introduced into the United States. We cannot control every plane ride. We can control whether the virus finds a welcome mat when it arrives. Trump’s gift has always been the same. He takes something real, fear, frustration, distrust, and he aims it at whatever institution stands nearest. Then he tells people to hate the people trying to help them. He turns public service into villainy, expertise into elitism, and basic competence into something suspicious.

And RFK Jr. brings his own special ingredient. He makes contrarianism sound like courage. He treats settled science like a debate club, as if immunology is just a matter of vibes and stubbornness. He gives people permission to believe that the safest thing you can do for your child is to reject the systems that keep children alive. Together, they do not build health, they build doubt, and doubt is contagious.

A real “Make America Healthy Again” agenda would be plain and measurable. It would support primary care, it would fight addiction with treatment and compassion, and it would invest in nutrition and safer housing and cleaner air. It would make vaccines easier to get, not harder to trust. Instead, we are watching adults with enormous platforms romanticize the unraveling of public health. They sell rebellion as wellness, suspicion as strength, and they sell the idea that it is freedom to bring back diseases our grandparents feared. It is not freedom, it is failure.

If you want the truth that punches the heart, here it is. A country is not healthy when it starts relearning pain we already solved, a country is not healthy when the price of political theater is paid in pediatric wards, and a country is absolutely not healthy when protecting children becomes controversial.

There is no glamour in the fix, no applause line, there is only the quiet, stubborn work of taking care of one another. The work of believing in evidence, of doing what protects the people you will never meet. The saddest thing is how avoidable this is. We know what measles is, we know what stops it, we know what happens when we pretend we do not.

You can call it “Make America Healthy Again” all you want. But a slogan cannot vaccinate a child, a slogan cannot pay the medical bills, a slogan cannot put the breath back in a parent’s lungs as they watch their baby suffer. And most importantly, a slogan cannot bring a child back once incompetence has taken them away.

I say this all the time, but please, call Congress. Make your voice heard, tell your friends, your family, teachers, coaches, neighbors, pediatricians, anyone who will listen that you support vaccination against preventable diseases. And tell them why.

Because this is not abstract, this is not a debate club. This is not “just a difference of opinion.” This is children’s bodies, this is fevers that will not break, this is the sound of a parent trying not to panic. This is the moment you realize an illness we have already defeated is walking back into the room because we let it. Tell them why we vaccinate.

Tell them about Dr. John Enders, Dr. Thomas Peebles, Dr. Samuel Katz, and Dr. Maurice Hilleman. Tell them about the boy whose name should be spoken with gratitude, David Edmonston, who helped give the world the measles strain that made the vaccine possible.

They looked at a world where kids got sick by the millions, where families buried children for no reason except bad luck and bad timing, and they said: not anymore. They decided they would not sit politely and watch the suffering continue, they chose a better future on purpose. They chose evidence, they chose work, and they chose the hard, careful, unglamorous labor of saving lives.

And it worked. After measles vaccination was introduced, reported cases in the United States fell by 90% within a few years. Not because people “manifested health.” Not because of a slogan, not because someone yelled louder than the science. It fell because vaccines work. That is the truth, no controversy, no conspiracy. Just facts that should feel comforting, like a hand on your shoulder in the dark.

This is what breaks my heart. We had the answer, we still have the answer, we are watching people try to throw it away and call that freedom. And I simply will not stand by this. I will not be quiet while preventable disease is welcomed back like it deserves a seat at the table. I will make my voice loud and known, and I hope you do the same.

Call, write, show up, and say it clearly: We can protect children, we have protected children, and we are not going backwards.