commercial interests
Ten years after Brexit, it seems reasonable to ask what effects Brexit has caused on health-related matters for the UK and beyond. Here is my attenpt to provide an answer; these are the 8 issues that come to my mind:
- Workforce Disruption and Recruitment Shift: The ending of free movement led to a sharp drop in EU-trained doctors, nurses, and social care staff. To plug these vacancy gaps, the UK was forced into recruiting heavily from non-EU nations. This created a fragile reliance on international recruitment from countries facing their own healthcare worker shortages. In turn, this further supported the xenophobic sentiments of some UK citizens.
- Medicine Supply Problems: Leaving the EU single market introduced significant customs and regulatory friction. This friction directly contributed to the frequency and severity of local pharmaceutical shortages in the UK.
- Loss of Regulatory Leverage: By exiting the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the UK became a standalone market. Pharmaceutical companies now regularly prioritize the much larger EU and US markets for rolling out cutting-edge new treatments, leaving the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to act as a “rule-taker” by fast-tracking approvals already granted elsewhere.
- Cross-Border Friction: Reciprocal healthcare arrangements became more complex under the new Global Health Insurance Card (GHIC) system. While basic travel is covered, specialized cross-border medical networks face ongoing administrative and legal hurdles. Many British ex-pats’ found themselves without health cover.
- Regulatory Divergence in Training and Innovation: The UK has increasingly diverged from EU rules, such as lowering the mandatory clinical training hours required for a nursing degree to get staff into hospitals faster. Additionally, medical technology and AI developers now face double-compliance costs (clearing separate UK and EU hurdles). This makes the UK a more expensive market to launch new health technologies.
- The Macro-economic Squeeze: The overall economic downturn resulting from Brexit reduced UK GDP, shrinking the available tax revenues. This has directly limited the government’s financial capacity to fund the NHS, to clear post-pandemic backlogs, and to invest in long-term social care reform.
- Exacerbating Health Inequalities: As inflation, food costs, and supply chain disruptions damaged the UK, vulnerable socioeconomic groups have been hit the hardest. These economic pressures, combined with a chronically strained social care sector, significantly widen UK health inequalities.
- Compounding Pressure on Patient Outcomes: While ultimate health metrics, such as mortality rates and overall life expectancy, are influenced by dozens of complex variables, an underfunded NHS, chronic staffing vulnerabilities, and restricted access to new drugs create a persistent, negative headwind against public health which, in the long run, can only negatively affect patient outcomes.
All of these effects are clearly negative.
Can anyone think of a positive effect?
I can’t!
Critics of so-called alternative medicine (SCAM) often point out that much of it lacks plausibility. Proponents of SCAM tend to think that this is an irrelevance. So, what is plausibility, and why does it matter?
Think of scientific plausibility as a reality check. Before scientists spend time and money testing a new idea, they ask a basic question: Does it actually line up with what we already know about how the universe works? While an idea being plausible doesn’t automatically make it true, it acts as a crucial filter. It helps us separate ideas that are worth investigating from those that break the fundamental laws of logic, physics, chemistry, biology, etc.
This is exactly where many SCAMs fall apart. Their claims often contradict basic science before a study even begins. Take homeopathy, for example. It relies on the idea that a substance can cure an illness, even if it is diluted over and over again, often to the point where not a single molecule of the original ingredient is left. This directly defies molecular theory and the well-established “dose-response relationship,” which simply states that the amount of a substance matters. Similarly, practices like “energy healing” postulate mysterious vital energies that cannot be seen, felt, or measured by any instrument known to modern science.
This matters because it changes how we look at “proof.” In science, if an idea is highly unlikely from the start, a single positive study usually isn’t a breakthrough. Instead, it’s much more likely to be a fluke, a statistical error, the result of a flawed experiment or even fraud.
Instead of trying to fix these scientific contradictions, proponents of SCAM often change the subject or move the goalpost. They might, for instance, that claim the scientific method is closed-minded or simply ignore negative results. But you cannot bypass the rules of reality. If a treatment claims to do something that contradicts everything we know about nature, it requires extraordinary proof to be taken seriously.
I do understand why SCAM enthusiasts try to ignore the issue of plausibility. But ignoring it runs several risks. For instance, it risks doing research that is entirely wasteful. More importantly perhaps, it risks paying undue attention to false positive results which, in turn, can seriously harm vulnerable patients – just think of a cancer patient who has fallen victim to the claims of homeopaths – backed by multiple, implausible and fase-positive results – suggesting that homeopathy can cure cancer.
The Trump administration is trying to introduce new rules that would put political appointees, rather than career scientists and civil servants, in the decisive role on federal research grants. The proposal would make senior appointees review grants for compliance with law and the Trump’s priorities, and it would make it easier to terminate grants already awarded.
The proposal was published by the White House budget office in late May 2026 and is part of a broader effort to tighten political control over federal spending rules. The administration plans to implement the proposal on 1 October. The comment period is open through 13 July*.
Under the draft rules, political appointees would have oversight over grants and could decide whether funding aligns with Trump’s wishes. The new rules would let appointees terminate grants after they have already been awarded. Scientists therefore warn that ongoing projects could be put at risk. Peer review would be weakened and expert views treated as advisory rather than decisive.
This would decisively move funding decisions away from scientific merit and toward political criteria which would chill work on politically sensitive topics and give non-experts the power to shape what gets investigated.
Crucially, this is not a one-off move: Trump has already signed an executive order in August 2025 directing agencies to give appointees oversight of grants so they would advance his priorities. The new proposal is the regulatory mechanism that would turn that earlier order into a permanent system.
In practical terms, this legislation is a major shift from expert-led grant to politically supervised grant-making. It constitutes a direct threat to scientific independence.
You can submit your public comment on the OMB proposed rule at:
https://www.regulations.gov/docket/OMB-2026-0034
Steps:
- Go to that link and click the “Open for Comments” button (or directly click “Comment” on the docket page).
- Scroll to the bottom and click “Comment.”
- Start your comment by including the relevant section number in brackets, for example [200.461], so OMB can route it properly.
- Write in your own words, focusing on specific impacts on your work or institution.
- Avoid including private details like your home address or phone number, since comments are posted publicly.
“Science and pseudoscience diverge particularly sharply in their ethical and moral foundations. While science is built upon principles of honesty, openness, and responsibility, pseudoscience undermines these values often by placing ideology and belief over evidence and truth. Science is not least an ethical enterprise, and the divide between science and pseudoscience is a matter of profound moral importance. The ethical stakes become especially acute when pseudoscience causes harm…”
These lines come from my recent book, THE LEOPARD LILY PROJECT, which is only marginally about so-called alternative medicine (SCAM). Yet they do apply well to SCAM which does not merely fail the test of scientific rigor but also fails the test of medical ethics. When a practice trades empirical validation for dogmatic ideology, it ceases to be an innocent alternative and becomes a profound moral transgression. SCAM regularly promises holistic salvation while actively undermining the principles of honesty, openness, and responsibility, effectively replacing rigorous scrutiny with profitable mystique.
The ethical stakes transition from academic to tragic whenever a vulnerable patient is guided away from effective treatments. SCAM cloaks itself in the gentle language of empathy and natural, holistic, individualised healing, yet its business model relies on exploiting the desperation of the sick. Informed consent is rendered impossible when patients are fed misleading or even fabricated data and disproven promises. By substituting anecdotes for evidence, SCAM weaponizes false hope, monetizing the fear of illness under the guise of medical autonomy. SCAM fosters a broader culture of conspiratorial thinking that systematically erodes public trust in collective public health infrastructure.
When conventional physicians prescribe a treatment, they are bound by evidence, medical ethics, regulatory oversight, and a legal duty of care. When SCAM practitioners prescribe an unproven therapy, they operate in an ethical void, often shielded from accountability by vague disclaimers.
Science remains an ethical enterprise acknowledging its own limitations and subjecting its claims to rigorous correction. Pseudoscience demands faith instead of evidence and leaves its patients to bear the physical consequences of its intellectual dishonesty. To pick up and rephrase the theme from my recent book: evidence-based medicine and SCAM diverge particularly sharply in their ethical and moral foundations.
Internal HHS and CDC communications leaked by the US Senate HELP Committee expose a truly scary crisis of institutional integrity. Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. systematically dismantled evidence-based public health infrastructure to implement his personal, ideological and dangerous agenda. This was not merely a shift in administrative policy; it was an aggressive, top-down politicisation of science that directly compromised public safety.
It is now clear that less than 24 hours after his confirmation on 29/30 January 2025 – in the midst of a severe flu season that had already claimed 16,000 lives, including 68 children – Kennedy issued a direct mandate to halt active flu vaccine public service advertisements. Internal communications from HHS Director of Communications Andrew Nixon explicitly confirm this “was a direct ask from Secretary Kennedy.”
The institutional damage caused by Kennedy’s actions extends far beyond suppressed messaging into structural purges. In fact, it seems likely that Kennedy committed perjury. During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy misled lawmakers regarding his intentions to restrict vaccine access and his past anti-vaccine interventions. Once in power, his chief of staff enforced an “absolute need for political review” over career scientists. Kennedy subsequently fired the entire 17-member Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), replacing them with people with strong anti-vaccine views. When career CDC Director Susan Monarez resisted rubber-stamping these politically motivated recommendations, Kennedy fired her, triggering a wave of high-level resignations among the agency’s top medical officers.
The leaked emails also confirm that Kennedy bypassed standard scientific clearance protocols to dispatch handpicked researchers into confidential CDC databases. This was a deliberate attempt to weaponize raw public health data to manufacture evidence for a spurious vaccine-autism link that has been thoroughly debunked by global longitudinal studies involving millions of children.
By substituting ideological loyalty for empirical evidence, the US administration has compromised the foundational mechanics of medicine. When a federal health agency is forced to prioritize dogma over data, the ultimate cost is inevitably paid in preventable human disease and death.
The conclusion: Kennedy has likely committed the serious crime of perjury, has shown to be a danger to our (the damage can quickly spread beyond the US) health, and in my view has to be removed from office asap.
Having narcissistic tendencies, e.g. bragging or making yourself the center of attention, are normal, if they occur only occasionally. However, Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is different. With NPD, symptoms are more severe, occur regularly and in different situations and environments, and make relationships with others challenging.
The 9 most common symptoms of NPD are the following:
- Grandiose sense of self-importance.
- Preoccupation with fantasies of success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
- Belief that they are “special” and should associate only with high-status people or institutions.
- Need for excessive admiration.
- Strong sense of entitlement.
- Interpersonally exploitative behaviour, using others to achieve their own ends.
- Lack of empathy, with little recognition of others’ feelings or needs.
- Envy of others, or belief that others are envious of them.
- Arrogant or haughty attitudes and behaviours.
Now, let’s consider a person who is almost constantly in our minds, mainly because he makes the headline news practically every day:
DONALD J TRUMP.
Does he perhaps display any of the above-listed symptoms? Let’s find out by going through them one by one and citing concrete examples**:
- Trump displays grandiose sense of self-importance regularly and to an extreme degree. Example: in August 2019, he told reporters, “I am the chosen one”.
- Trump displays preoccupation with fantasies of success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love regularly and to an extreme degree. Example: he said he was “always the best athlete” before his first presidential physical in January 2018.
- Trump displays his belief that he is “special” and should associate only with high-status people or institutions regularly and to an extreme degree. Example: in his 2018 rally line about the “elite,” he said, “We’re the elite… We’re the super-elite”.
- Trump displays a need for excessive admiration regularly and to an extreme degree. Example: according to a 2026 analysis, he has a “relentless demand for exaltation,” wants “praise, admiration, and accolades,” and even accepts honors that critics said were meant for others.
- Trump displays a strong sense of entitlement regularly and to an extreme degree. Example: he defended accepting a luxury Boeing 747 from Qatar by saying it would be “stupid” to turn down a “free plane,” and the aircraft was reported to be intended for his use as Air Force One.
- Trump displays interpersonally exploitative behaviour, using others to achieve their own ends regularly and to an extreme degree. Example: in the border detention context, he “exploits his power” and “leverages cruelty strategically,” especially in policies that harmed vulnerable migrants and children.
- Trump displays lack of empathy, with little recognition of others’ feelings or needs regularly and to an extreme degree. Example: the family-separation policy at the US border, which causes severe suffering, while Trump continues to treat it as a political instrument rather than a human tragedy.
- Trump displays envy of others, or belief that others are envious of them regularly and to an extreme degree. Example: he has repeatedly made unverified claims about his inauguration crowd size, television ratings, and rally attendance, frequently comparing them directly to Obama’s numbers in an attempt to prove he is more widely loved
- Trump displays arrogant or haughty attitudes and behaviours regularly and to an extreme degree. Example: While accepting the party’s nomination in Cleveland, Ohio, Trump delivered a dark assessment of the US, describing a nation plagued by rising crime, economic decay, and international humiliation. After spending a large portion of the speech detailing these systemic crises, he uttered (in grammatically wrong English): “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”
So is Trump suffering from NPD?
Judge for yourself.
I guess he is not suffering from but enjoying it!
___________________
And what is the solution? Treatment of NPD can be difficult because people with NPD may not feel therapy is necessary, so progress often depends on motivation and a good therapeutic fit. There is no effective drug treatment and talking therapies are usually recommended. In Trump’s case, removal from office would obviously be an acutely necessary measure.
__________________
**I am sure you know of much better examples (the coice is truly vast); feel free to cite them in the comments.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, is demanding that the journal Toxicology Reports explain in detail why it removed a 2021 paper he has cited in support of his anti-vaccine stance. The study had concluded that “While the findings in this paper are not proof of an association between infant vaccines and infant deaths, they are highly suggestive of a causal relationship.”
In his letter to the editors, Kennedy accuses the journal of suppressing research linking vaccines to sudden infant death. However, the evidence reveals quite clearly that Kennedy is not seeking transparency but rather attempting to bully a peer-reviewed journal that correctly identified fatal methodological flaws in a paper Kennedy continues to promote.
The removed study claimed to link vaccines to infant deaths using data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). The journal removed the paper because VAERS is a passive reporting system that cannot establish causality. Any conclusion claiming vaccines cause deaths from such data is therefore not valid. The editors determined the methodology was seriously flawed and that the author’s responses to critiques were unsatisfactory. Consequently, the paper would mislead readers and harm the public. In this situation, it would have been unethical NOT to retract!
Kennedy’s demand for a “full explanation” ignores that the journal had already provided a clear, evidence-based removal notice. He wants to know who reviewed the paper and what standards were applied, yet these are standard peer-review procedures. Framing a legitimate scientific correction as censorship reveals Kennedy’s disregard for science and evidence-based medicine. As HHS secretary, he is responsible for protecting public health, yet he continues to cite fraudulent research that contradicts established scientific consensus on vaccine safety.
The story is reminiscent of the ongoing conflict over the landmark Danish vaccine study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. It tracked over 1.2 million children born in Denmark between 1997 and 2018. Exploiting a natural experiment created by evolving national immunization schedules, researchers analyzed the dose-response relationship of aluminum adjuvants. The study found no evidence linking increased cumulative exposure to an elevated risk of 50 chronic pediatric conditions, including neurodevelopmental, autoimmune, and allergic disorders.
Despite its massive scale and rigorous design, Kennedy labeled the research a “deceitful propaganda stunt” and demanded its retraction. However, Kennedy’s criticisms rely on data misrepresentation and a fundamental misunderstanding of epidemiological methodology. First, Kennedy cherry-picked non-significant supplementary data, falsely claiming a 67% increased risk of Asperger’s syndrome. In reality, the finding had a wide confidence interval, lacked statistical significance, and completely vanished when researchers analyzed the full follow-up data. Second, Kennedy objected to the lack of a completely unvaccinated control group. Experts counter that the unvaccinated cohort (1.2%) was too small to measure rare outcomes accurately and would introduce severe confounding bias due to differing family lifestyles. Finally, Kennedy levelled inaccurate claims of financial corruption against Denmark’s Statens Serum Institut, a public research body that had long since divested its vaccine manufacturing arm.
The medical community has firmly rejected Kennedy’s attacks. The journal refused his retraction demand, and independent experts have defended the study as the strongest available evidence of vaccine aluminum safety. After all, aluminum salts have been used safely for a century, and vaccine-derived amounts are eclipsed by daily environmental and dietary intake.
The inescapable conclusion is that Kennedy’s campaigns are not about accountability or about promoting scientific rigor; they are about promoting his dangerous type of misinformation. His continued advocacy of pseudoscience exposes his commitment to ideology over evidence, a truly dangerous stance for anyone leading the nation’s health agency. It is high time, I feel, that he gets sacked before he does any more lasting damage to public health in the US and beyond!
So-called alternative medicine (SCAM) likes to present itself as a champion of disease prevention. Its advocates routinely claim to promote health before disease develops, to strengthen the body’s defences, and to address root causes rather than symptoms. This rhetoric is highly attractive, because prevention sounds proactive, humane, and economical. Crucially, it is also good for the SCAM practitioner’s bank account. Yet there is a snag: almost none of the preventive claims made for SCAM are supported by reliable evidence, whereas the prevention that works comes overwhelmingly from conventional medicine and science.
To show preventive benefit, an intervention must demonstrably reduce the incidence of symptom, disease, complication, or mortality in properly designed studies. That may require randomised trials, epidemiological studies, large cohorts, reproducible findings, and enough follow-up to show that fewer people actually experienced the given endpoint. Mainstream medicine has repeatedly met this standard. Immunization, blood pressure control, smoking cessation, lipid lowering, cancer screening, and risk-factor modification are all products of biomedical research, not of alternative healing traditions.
SCAM, by contrast, tends to use prevention in a loose, impressionistic, and unfalsifiable way. A practitioner may claim that a treatment “balances energy,” “supports immunity,” or “keeps the body in harmony,” but such phrases do not establish a preventive effect. They are placeholders for evidence, not evidence itself. In practice, the absence of disease after treatment is treated as proof that the treatment worked, even though the same outcome occurs every day without any intervention at all.
Acupuncture is a good example. Its defenders portray it as a preventive system capable of preserving general health or warding off illness, but the evidence base does not support that claim. Some reviews do suggest that acupuncture may help with some pain-related and symptom-focused conditions, yet its preventive value is largely unproven. I am not aware of solid evidence to show that acupuncture prevents anything – but, if I am wrong, please do correct me.
Chiropractic care is even more revealing because preventive claims are often tied to the doctrine of spinal “subluxation” and nervous system dysfunction. Yet the literature on prevention is thin and methodologically weak. I am not aware of solid evidence to show that chiropractic prevents anything – but, if I am wrong, please do correct me.
Herbalism benefits from the romantic appeal of “natural” remedies, but that appeal should not be confused with demonstrated preventive efficacy. Individual plant compounds have certainly inspired real drugs, yet that is a triumph of pharmacology, not of herbalism as a system. When herbal medicines are tested for prevention, results are usually weak, inconsistent, or insufficient to support recommendation. I am not aware of solid evidence to show that herbal medicine prevents anything – but, if I am wrong, please do correct me.
Homeopathy is one of the most extreme cases within SCAM. It is often sold as gentle, individualized, and even preventive, but its basic principles are scientifically implausible, and its clinical evidence is either flawed or negative. Preventive homeopathy, including ideas such as “homeoprophylaxis,” is particularly problematic because it can give people a false sense of security while displacing interventions that genuinely prevent disease, such as vaccination. I am not aware of solid evidence to show that homeopathy prevents anything – but, if I am wrong, please do correct me.
SCAM speaks almost constantly about prevention, but the evidence for actual preventive benefit is close to non-existent. What we know about prevention, what truly reduces disease incidence and improves population health, comes from conventional medicine, epidemiology, public health, and biological science. SCAM will no doubt continue to borrow the language of medicine and prevention, but – as far as I can see – it has failed to supply the proof.
The health-related news comimg out of the US get more worrying by the day. In June 2026, a New World screwworm was detected in Texas cattle for the first time since 1966, a catastrophic failure traceable to the Trump administration’s systematic dismantling of animal disease prevention programs. The flesh-eating parasite, whose larvae consume living tissue and can kill livestock within days, has returned due to preventable policy choices.
Trump slashed over $382 million in USAID funding dedicated to international disease monitoring, including specific programs tracking screwworm spread through Central America and Mexico. More than 100 US-funded FAO programs were thus terminated, representing nearly 10% of the FAO’s planned budget. Scientists had warned for months that screwworm was advancing north through Mexico, accumulating 9,574 confirmed cases by late 2025, yet the administration cut surveillance funding precisely when vigilance was most critical.
The consequences are now undeniable. An infected three-week-old calf was discovered in La Pryor, Texas, approximately 30 miles from the Mexican border, triggering a 20-kilometer quarantine zone. The pest could further shrink the US cattle herd, already at its lowest level in 75 years, potentially costing Texas alone up to $1.8 billion in economic losses through livestock deaths, medication expenses, and labor costs.
Beyond negligence, Trump actively undermined US ranchers. In October 2025, he announced plans to import Argentine beef to lower grocery prices, calling domestic cattle producers’ concerns about tariffs as not understanding economics. The cattle industry condemned this as “undermining the future of farmers” and creating “turmoil at a crucial time”. Canadian authorities subsequently imposed temporary livestock import restrictions from affected Texas areas, emblematic of the international trade vulnerabilities the outbreak creates.
The administration’s response – claiming they “bought time” while defending against inevitable predictions that models showed screwworm entering in 2025 – reads as damage control rather than genuine accomplishment. Meanwhile, the USDA established sterile fly releases and quarantines, emergency measures that should have been unnecessary with proper preventative funding.
Trump’s agricultural policy combines reckless budget cuts with market interference that harms American producers. The screwworm outbreak is not merely bad luck; it is the direct result of prioritizing ideological slashing of foreign aid over protecting American food security and the livelihoods of ranchers who already face record-high consumer prices and shrinking herds.
New World screwworm poses serious, potentially fatal dangers to humans through myiasis, where larvae burrow into and consume living tissue. While primarily affecting livestock, humans can be infested as well – particularly those with open wounds, diabetes, or peripheral vascular disease. The first US human case was confirmed in August 2024. Infestations cause painful, foul-smelling wounds that worsen rapidly and can lead to death if untreated, with scalp involvement carrying an 8% mortality rate as larvae may burrow through the skull into the brain.
Update 11/6/26:
USDA had already confirmed the first US livestock case in decades in a 3-week-old calf in Zavala County, Texas, and by June 9, 2026 it was reporting six domestic animal detections, including cases in Texas, New Mexico, and a goat in Gillespie County.
A few final points:
- Precautions consist in measures like keeping wounds clean and covered, wearing protective clothing, using insect repellent, and sleeping indoors with screens are essential.
- Treatment might include Ivermectin – yes, the drug that was hyped for COVID might finally come into its own.
- The US meat market share in Europe is extremely small, less than 1% of Europe’s total meat consumption.
- The whole story might seem insignificant, would it not confirm the many other ways in which the Trump administration is almost systematically endangering public health in the US and beyond (see previous posts).
The US resurgence of measles in 2026 serves as a stark, data-driven refutation of the anti-vaccine rhetoric championed by quacks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. For years, vaccine antagonists have framed immunisations as a matter of personal autonomy, minimizing the societal dangers of declining rates. Yet, public health is not governed by ideology, but by biology. The realities of 2026 – marked by over 2,000 confirmed measles cases across 40 US jurisdictions – demonstrate that when charlatans undermine trust in medical science, the real-world consequence is the return of preventable, highly contagious and dangerous diseases.
The core flaw in RFK Jr.’s rhetoric, it seems to me, is the failure to understand that vaccine protection is a collective barrier, not just an individual shield. Measles is one of the most infectious viruses known to humanity, requiring a high community vaccination threshold of 95% to maintain herd immunity. When coverage drops below this line, the virus easily finds pathways to spread. Because of sustained anti-vaccine sentiment, US kindergarten MMR coverage dropped from 95.2% in 2019–2020 to a dangerous 92.5% by the 2024–2025 school year. This decline left roughly 286,000 children unprotected, effectively dismantling the wall that kept measles at bay for decades.
Furthermore, public health crises thrive on localized vulnerability. While national averages can mask the severity of the issue, anti-vaccine messaging often clusters within specific communities, creating relatively dense pockets of under-vaccinated populations. When measles enters these communities, it does not remain isolated; it triggers rapid, localized outbreaks where almost all of cases are tied directly to these transmission clusters.
Beyond its well-known immediate dangers, a measles infection inflicts severe, long-term damage on the human body by causing a phenomenon known as immune amnesia. The measles virus actively targets and destroys memory T and B cells, the specialized white blood cells responsible for remembering past pathogens. A single measles infection can wipe out 11% to 73% of a person’s preexisting antibodies, effectively erasing the body’s immunological memory. While the patient develops immunity to measles itself, their defense system is left “flying blind” against other entirely unrelated viruses and bacteria they had previously beaten or been vaccinated against. This induced state of generalized immunosuppression typically lasts from two to five years, leaving recovered individuals dramatically more vulnerable to secondary, life-threatening infections long after the initial measles rash has cleared.
Ultimately, the current measles spikein the US illustrates that US public health control is being sabotaged. When prominent morons like RFK Jr. weaponize anti-vax delusions and distort clinical data, they do not simply foster debate, they actively erode the herd immunity threshold. The current US outbreak proves that the protection wall has thinned below the critical margin of safety. Far from being under control, measles has found a resurgence precisely because the rhetoric of figures like RFK Jr. has opened the door for a dangerous, preventable virus to reclaim its ground in and beyond the US.
