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Showing posts with label Anti-Vaxxers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anti-Vaxxers. Show all posts
Barry Gilheany ✍ When President Donald Trump makes unscripted announcements which spring from what could be either damaged or under-developed frontal lobes of his brain, immediate responses can range from pressing the panic button to shrugging off “that’s just Trump being Trump, he’s not being serious”. 


The latter response is probably the correct reaction to his recent public musings about a United Ireland being “a good idea” which although coming from a well of insouciant ignorance of and wilful blindness to the history, complexities and current equilibrium of forces on the island of Ireland do not actually change anything vis-a-viz the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement despite the predictable nationalist/republican glee and unionist harrumphing. 

Likewise the gory threats that Trump issued over, for example, to bring “fire and fury” to North Korea; to “erase Iranian civilisation” and to annex Greenland and Canada which have eventually resulted in sheepish climbdowns suggesting that his bark is worse than his bite or that the Emperor has no clothes. However, these pronouncements were made in the realm of foreign affairs where despite his deluded beliefs in his divine omnipotence, the hallmark of tyrants throughout history, he simply bends the rest of the world to his will at the click of fingers. A different calculus emerges when he deploys his ignorance and cognitive illiteracy at home with the power of Presidential fiat in the trifecta polity that is currently the United States of America. Such is the case with his executive order of 10 August 2026 on childhood vaccinations

This order – which gives recommendations only, since vaccine policies are set by individual states, says that all children should receive just 11 of the current 18 vaccines recommended by the American Academy of Paediatrics. It recommends separating all the combined MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine into three separate shots. And it says that each vaccine should be given on a separate medical visit, not together.[1] The Order also directs the Department of Justice to investigate where starts are in violation of exemptions for childhood vaccine mandates, including parental authority and disability accommodations as well as religious and medical reasons.[2]

This was followed by an announcement by Trump on 18 September 2026 that his administration will recommend that some childhood vaccines be separated into five 20% doses six months apart. In justifying reduction of vaccine strengths; he forecast, using powers of scientific observation and forecasting known only to him, he predicted that there would be a “massive reduction” in autism. He did not state which vaccines would be affected. Not coincidentally, The Washington Post linked remarks by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, US Health Secretary and prominent vaccine sceptic, telling his Children’s Health Defence organisation that “they have a friend in the White House” to these announcements.[3]

Trump’s justifications for the vaccine restrictions were depressingly one of a piece with his stream of consciousness, shooting from the hip, deranged statements and the rehash of the totally debunked connection between receipt of the MMR vaccine and the onset of autism in infants. He said that the MMR shots were “sort of like a nuclear weapon “and could be “quite lethal”. On being asked for evidential proof for the latter; he said in typical folksy wisdom: “What I’ve heard is that there are some people who say that it is that way.” He went on to claim that the doses were the size of a soda bottle, and were being “poured” into the child. Such anonymous attribution is a significant vector of misinformation transmission in relation to vaccination. In fact a single three-vaccine shot is the equivalent of about 10 drops of water.[4]

Measured scientifically based response came from the American paediatrician and vaccine, immunology and virology expert, Paul Offit, best known as the co-inventor of the rotavirus RotaKey, credited with saving hundreds of lives. Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology at the University of Philadelphia and Director of the Vaccine Education Centre at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and author of numerous books and scholarly articles on the subject area, Offit makes the case against vaccine shot separation using the following scientific logic:

When you create a vaccine, you do a dose response curve, and you’re trying to give the least amount of vaccine that induces an immune response that’s protective. So you don’t want to give too much, where you know you don’t need all that, and you don’t want to give too little, where you know is sub-immunogenic.[5]

Jose Romero, a former CDC (Centre for Disease Control) official told the Washington Post that vaccines are formulated in such a way that the total dose produces the intended immune response, so separation into individual shots wouldn’t necessarily make them safer.[6]

While Trump’s stance on vaccine reflects the skin-deep knowledge and reflective practice which he brings to practically every public matter, a more insidious and pernicious strategy around vaccine scepticism is taken by Robert F, Kennedy, Jr. Following the playbook of plausible deniability set out by Dr Andrew Wakefield in his notorious study of twelve gastro-intestinal child subjects in 1998 when he postulated but did not definitively state that there was a causal link between MMR and autism; Kennedy assures Americans in a recent CNN interview that he “never questioned the efficacy of the MMR vaccine," he cultivates doubt and confusion with lies every available opportunity, for example stating the vaccine causes many deaths every year as well as the same afflictions as measles itself: encephalitis, blindness, etc. The CDC on its web page on “Autism and Vaccines” has stated that “… ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility.” So far, Congress has not reacted to correct these outrageous contortions of the truth and the trashing of scientific expertise.[7]

The logistics of the proposed new vaccine regimes will likely lead to more measles outbreaks and deaths. The full schedule of jabs will necessitate many more visits to the doctor; some will inevitably be missed. Single shots for mumps, measles and rubella are currently not available in the US; making them will be expensive and some children will contract the diseases before completion of all the shots.[8]

So these measures will likely worsen the incipient and interconnected public health crisis concerning measles incidence across the US which developed last year. That year’s outbreak began in February 2025 in unvaccinated communities in West Texas. Three people died; two children in Texas and adult in New Mexico and dozens of people were hospitalised. Public health experts maintain the true number of affected persons may be higher that state health departments have confirmed. In the first six months of 2025, there were 1,288 cases nationally surpassing 2019 when there were 1,274 cases.[9]

This year has seen more than 2,500 confirmed measles cases in the US, in previous years the numbers were usually in the low hundreds or lower; before a measles vaccine was licensed in 1963, they could approximate to half a million[10]. Back to the future then for the revenge of the purebloods in a country where private wellness literally and figuratively carries a higher premium than public health.

References

[1] Philip Ball … on MAGA v vaccines. The New World Issue 3 September 2026 p.37

[2] Trump proposes splitting sone childhood vaccines into five separate doses. Independent Journal Review.19 September 2026

[3] Anniko Kim Constantino and Jacobh Premuk. Trump signs executive order calling for fewer childhood vaccines, falsely linking shots to autism. CNBC. Health and Science 1 September 2026.

[4] Ball, op cit.

[5] CNBC, op cit.

[6] Ibid

[7] Ball, op cit

[8] Ibid

[9] CNBC, op cit

[10] Ball

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Making America Unhealthy Again 🪶 Trump And Vaccines

Barry Gilheany ✍ A virtually fundamental tenet of the wellness woo world is the supremacy of natural healing processes. 

Opposition to vaccination is based on the belief that vaccines represent the violation of the body’s natural healing properties. Antivaxxers hold that good nutrition and environmental surrounds (no dispute there) and exposure to infectious childhood diseases such as measles and chicken pox (at the famed “chickenpox parties) builds up natural immunity to these maladies. The exposure of the body to “foreign” elements such as spike protein is thus a deliberate assault and has been held by opponents of Covid-19 vaccines to have been a major factor in the deaths from myocardial conditions that they attribute to the jabs. 

That a welter of medical trial and mortality data and peer reviewed studies has overwhelmingly confirmed the safety of vaccines does not and will likely never shift antivaxxer beliefs. Opponents of water fluoridation also see similarly malign threats to nature’s healing capacities by powerful forces like Big Pharma and an overweening state. Fundamentalist Catholic opposition to both artificial contraception and abortion is based on Natural law precepts and, like antivaxxers, deployed a corpus of pseudoscience such as supposed causal relationships between pregnancy terminations and breast cancer and infertility to bolster their arguments. 

Recently, in another fraught area of women’s reproductive health, birth and the scandals around the state of maternity services detailed most forcefully in the Ockenden Report on Nottingham Maternity Services and the Amos review on national NHS maternity care, ideological fixations with the desirability of ‘natural birth’ have been identified as inimical to pregnant women’s health. This body of work has also uncovered deep institutional racism over the experience of BME women in maternity care. Essentially contested views on pregnancy and birth have created space for bad actors to operate in; bad actors such as the Free Birth Society who were the subject of a previous TPQ article of mine and who have again featured in more baby deaths around the world.

Natural Birth Ideology

Natural Birth Ideology is the belief that physiological, low intervention birth is the ideal birth method. It emphasises vaginal birth without medical intervention such as induction, epidural or surgical procedures, viewing childbirth as a natural process, best supported by midwifery and minimal interference. Advocates argue that it respects the body’s natural rhythm, reduces unnecessary interventions and promotes maternal autonomy. The spectrum of this ideology ranges from informal, low-intervention birth to the Free Birth Society doctrine that all births should be physiological regardless of risk. Historically some beliefs about natural birth were influenced by moral or religious ideas, such as the notion that childbirth pain was a divine punishment. Modern natural birth ideology is grounded in the philosophy of salutogenesis and advocacy for physiological birth rather than moral judgment. It often advocates with midwifery led care models and home birth advocacy.[1]

Rigid adherence to natural birth ideology can conflict with medical care and informed patient choice. A particular imperative for supporters is the reduction of the need for caesarean sections to the bare minimum The prioritisation of ‘normal birth at call cost’ has had deleterious effects of standards of maternal and neonatal care within the NHS and its promotion has been identified by many of its critics as a significant factor in the series of maternity hospital care scandals that has riven the NHS in the opening decades of the 21st century, the most damning of which was senior midwife Donna Ockenden’s recently published four year report into the “cruel” and substandard care in maternity services at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. The ideological divide in the NHS over natural or ‘normal’ birth theory and practice has been acute. Amongst the numerous malpractices identified by Donna Ockenden that the “quest for normal birth” contributed to the avoidable harm and deaths of more than 500 women and babies. However in her national review of maternity care, Baroness Amos and her team “did not find that ‘normal’ birth ideology’ was currently widespread’. This conclusion led to the resignation of Bill Kirkup, one of her twelve clinical advisors and of Britain’s leading maternity investigators, from his role on the inquiry.[2]

NHS Maternity Services and Natural Birth Ideology

As alluded to earlier, caesarean or C-sections are a particular flashpoint in the Natural Births debate. From 2007 to 2017, the Royal College of Midwives advised that women should try to have a vaginal birth without surgical intervention, and NHS England told hospitals to try to reduce caesarean sections to about 20% of births. This “normal birth at any cost” culture was central to the scandal uncovered by Bill Kirkup in Morecambe Bay in 2015 where it was found that clinicians had ignored or failed to respond quickly enough to problems during childbirth. James Titcombe, whose son Joshua died of sepsis in 2008 after failures in the Morecambe Bay maternity scandal, said he believed natural birth ideology remained a “significant and widespread patient safety issue”, and that Amos’s review appeared to have “taken a superficial approach”.[3]

The hegemony of natural birth ideology and its effects on maternity patient care is laid out by Clare Wilson. She asserts that the best-known advocates of natural birth may be the National Childbirth Trust (NCT); she reports that those who attended NCT antenatal classes were discouraged by their teachers from seeking medical assistance. Less well known is that from the 1990s onwards the “natural” birth agenda was gaining ground among university researchers and campaigners and over the next decade it became baked into policy documents for midwives and doctors. A key development was the publication in 2012 of NHS guidelines produced in partnership with the Royal College of Midwives (RCM), the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) and the NCT which encouraged to boost their rate of “normal” births[4].

Called Focus on normal birth and reducing Caesarean section rates, it highlighted the UK’s rising C-section rates – 24 per cent in 2006 – and offered hospitals a range of measures to try to reduce them to 20 per cent and ideally 15 per cent. It claimed – without good evidence – that this would reduce rates of death and harm from childbirth as well as bringing the NHS financial savings. While the supposed premise of these guidelines was that it was better for mothers and babies to deliver vaginally, it was in reality a cost-cutting exercise according to an anonymously quoted former obstetrician.[5]

Wilson then details how the successive incidences of NHS maternity scandals took place in hospitals which had striven hardest for low C-section rates. First up was at Furness General Hospital in Morecambe Bay where 11 babies and one mother were found to have died needlessly the inquiry reported in 2015. According to Dr Bill Kirkup, one of the country’s leading maternity investigators, who led the inquiry “There was a growing mood amongst midwives to promote natural childbirth”[6]

Next came two similar maternity safety scandals at two linked hospitals in East Kent and Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital which for years had publicised its low C-section rate of 14 per cent compared with the national average of 23 per cent at the time. One East Kent mother said “I felt that … I was made to have a natural birth when an emergency C – section was more appropriate, just so they didn’t dent their precious natural birth rate”. Emily Barley whose baby Beatrice died at Barnsley Hospital in 2022 reported that every concern she raised was met with the rejoinder “It’s just normal birth, everything is OK”.[7]

Further evidence that ideology rather than patient health drove decision making especially in hospitals with extremely low C-sections but with higher rates of still births and neonatal deaths is provided by Dr Nadeem Maghal’s analysis of the ills at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. This Trust had the lowest rates of C-sections in the country between 2012 and 2023 but over the same period, its rate of stillbirths and newborn baby deaths were the worst nationally. Its own 2015 maternity strategy expected all parts of the service to actively promote “normal” birth ‘The home births team’s language emphasised that “birth” is a natural and physiological process.’[8]

Despite the mounting evidence of the harm being caused by the prioritising of “normal birth” at all costs culture, the ! newspaper revealed in November 2024 that NHS hospitals were continuing to place job adverts for midwives who will “promote normality”, eight of which were placed in 2024. It also reported that safety investigators were expressing alarm that potentially dangerous attempts to discourage women from medical assistance during childbirth are widespread.[9]

In 2022 Gill Walton, head of the RCM apologised for its part in promoting “normal” births that contributed to the deaths of mothers and babies admitting that some midwives had promoted an ideology that had gone too far. However belief in the superiority “normal” births under different guises such as the recommendation of ineffective alternative or complementary therapies in lieu of standard medical approaches; for instance offering aromatherapy if labour isn’t progressing which is contrary to medical guidelines.[10] The most high profile use of alternative therapies involves Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London whose maternity department states that staff use reflexology and aromatherapy to avoid medical induction of labour. It asserts that such treatments are non-invasive and rarely cause the unpleasant or long-lasting side effects that can be associated with medication’

Nottingham

The nadir of NHS maternity care was, of course, the scandal in Nottingham NHS Trust uncovered over four years of investigation and delivered in coruscating detail and tone by Donna Ockenden in Juhne 2026. About 2,500 families and more than 800 members of staff contributed to the inquiry over that time period. Overall, experts concluded, there were “potentially avoidable” outcomes for mothers and babies in 444 maternity cases leading up to May 2025, alongside 76 neonatal cases. All these cases were graded as two or three for harm – with grade two representing “significant concerns” and grade three “major concerns” over care. Different care may have altered the outcome for 260 babies who died or were harmed. Of that number, 155 babies died, while 105 suffered serious injury due to substandard care, with some left with permanent brain damage.[11]

Experts found adverse outcomes were linked to multiple factors including failures in the monitoring of babies; poor interpretation of heart monitoring; a failure to recognise babies were in distress during labour and a failure to escalate some cases to senior clinicians. Systems of oversight “were no longer fit for purpose” and there was a toxic and bullying work culture. Women in the middle of labour were told to “pull themselves together” while another submission from a mother recalled being told to “wait their turn” as there were “other women they had to sort”.[12] These problems had been known about since 2010.

Natural birth ideology was likely a major contributory factor some of the mistakes that occurred, according to the husband of Sarah Hawkins whose baby Harriet died in childbirth in 2016. A telling of the whole harrowing experience that Sarah suffered leads to that unavoidable conclusion. Despite pleading on the phone repeatedly with her midwives during her six days of labour, she was told not to come to hospital and on the one occasion that she did come in, she was given analgesic medication and sent home. After parts of the membranes covering the baby started being expelled from the womb, the midwives on duty failed to treat this development as an emergency. Rather than being examined in order to determine if the membranes were concealing a trapped umbilical cord which would have cut off Harriet’s oxygen supply and so signalling the need for an emergency C-section, Sarah was taken to a midwife led birthing pool intended only for women at low risk. While the bath was being prepared for a water birth and the midwives were discussing what aromatherapy oils to add to the water, Harriet was probably dead or dying. She was delivered stillborn nine hours later.

An external review of the case found that staff had made 13 errors and concluded that the death was “almost entirely preventable”. A few weeks before this tragedy, a doctor had told the couple “Don’t let anyone medicalise your birth”. A clearer exposition of the promotion of ideology over the safety of mother and baby could be made.

The Ethnicity Pain Gap

Over and above these multiple failings in maternity care is a metric of institutional racism known as the ‘ethnicity pain gap’. Experts have found that skin pigmentation often determines whether one is offered in all areas of healthcare, not just maternity care. For example, according to top public health academic Devi Sridhar, in the domain of cancer treatment patients from Black, South Asian and mixed ethnic backgrounds received fewer and lower doses of pain-relieving medication than people from white European backgrounds, even after controlling for patient age, cancer type, health condition, deprivation and other variables that could affect that decision.[13]

On maternity care, Guardian research has established that black women in England are almost twice as likely to have their births investigated for safety failings compared with their white counterparts. Black women in the UK are almost three times more likely to die during childbirth. An interim report published by the National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation included accounts of Asian women being stereotyped as “princesses”, with the implication that they were too demanding or unable to cope with pain, while black women were seen as having “tough” skin and able to tolerate pain.” The report also heard from black women who described experiences of being stereotyped as “the angry or aggressive black woman” which in turn affected their care. For example, in the words of one woman during a family evidence panel: “I feel like, for us black ladies, they feel like we can handle the pain, even when we are complaining we are in pain.”[14]

At the extreme end of the natural birth ideological continuum is the Free Birth Society (FBS), a multimillion-dollar organisation linked to baby deaths around the world, but whose founder Emilee Saldaya claims that during her time at the helm, she had “never heard of a woman dying in childbirth in the sovereign birth world”. Ten months after she made this grandiose claim in December 2024 on The Way Forward podcast, 30-year-old nutritionist, wellness influencer and first-time mother Stacey Warnecke, died from complications of a massive postpartum haemorrhage after a free birth attended by a Melbourne-based birth attendant or in FBS terminology “birth keeper” and friend and student of Saldaya, Emily Lal. It was one of two deaths in her five years as a birth keeper that Lal was to be named in; the other was of a newborn baby in 2022.[15]

Previously, a year-long Guardian investigation had identified 48 cases of late-term stillbirths or neonatal deaths or other forms of serious harm involving mothers or birth attendants who appeared to be linked to the US-based FBS. These cases were found in the US, Canada, Switzerland, France, South Africa, India, Australia and the UK. Now it tells the story of how Lal, a former insurance worker with no medical qualifications. She was trained by Saldaya and her business partner Yolande Norris-Clark, through their Radical Birth Keeper (RBK) school through a three month Zoom course where as one of 850 RBKs that they claim to have trained she was instructed in the art of brand-building through social media through the fog of scientific inaccuracies and dangerous misinformation.[16]

Among the pearls of wisdom inculcated to the students were that neonatal resuscitation can be a form of “sabotage”; that bacteria may not cause infection and that life-threatening pregnancy complications can be “variations of normal”. Norris-Clark and Saldaya have also, respectively, questioned the existence of gravity and whether the Earth is round. Experts who have reviewed the basic advice on dealing with emergencies given by FBS to trainee RBKs say it contains inaccurate, misleading and dangerous information. However in interviews on the Matrescence podcast in 2021 before the death of Ms Warnecke she appeared to suggest that she had the requisite lifesaving skills for emergency situations stating that:

If there was excessive bleeding or something out of the ordinary occurred that we considered to be a variation of normal, I’ve got the skills behind me to help the woman to birth her baby if she wants my help[17]

These stories of catastrophic midwifery misadventures are salutary tales of what can happen when ideology trumps medical care prerogatives. The saga of the use of puberty blockers in the Tavistock clinic is another. Medical dilemmas and controversies should always be framed and solved within a public health discourse. It is to be hoped that Nottingham and other maternity health scandals in the NHS will lead to a definitive step change in that direction.

References

[1] Copilot

[2] Hannah Barnes, 2026. Out of the Ordinary. The Amos Review cannot fix our broken maternity system. I’m not sure what can, The New Statesman 3-9 July p.31

[3] James Tapper, 2026. Maternity crisis: calls to investigate if ‘natural birth ideology’ has put mothers at risk. The Observer 5 July pp.6-7

[4] Clare Wilson, 2024. How the battle over ‘normal’ births is still damaging NHS maternity care. The I Paper 25 September.

[5] Ibid

[6] Ibid

[7] Ibid

[8] Dr Nadeem Maghal, 2025.  Natural Birth at All Costs Is an Ideology, Not a Care Model. Strasys 29 November.

[9] Wilson, op cit

[10] Ibid

[11] Gavin Bevis, 2026.  Baby deaths and toxic culture – the Nottingham maternity report at a glance BBC News Nottinghamshire. 24 June 2026.

[12] Ibid

[13] Devi Sridhar, 2026. The ‘ethnicity pain gap’ is real and fixable. The Guardian Journal. 3 July.


[14] Tobi Thomas, 2026. From birth until death. How the pain gap lasts for a lifetime. The Guardian 3 July 2026 pp. 14-15

[15] Sirin Kale and Melissa Davey 2026. Freebirths. How a ‘birth keeper’ was named in the inquests into two deaths. The Guardian 1 July pp.30-31

[16] Ibid, p.30

[17] Ibid

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Au Naturelle 🪶Pain, Pregnancy And The Sanctification Of The “Natural” Over Women’s Health And Welfare

Barry Gilheany ✍😔 The scenario that so many medical professionals and public health officials feared is coming to pass in the recent outbreak of a measles virus North London but is no less disturbing for that inevitability. 

There were 83 diagnosed cases in the last month according to the UK Health Service Authority. Most are children under 10 living in the Borough of Enfield, which has one of the lowest rates of vaccine uptake in the country. Not coincidentally, parts of Enfield including Edmonton, the epicentre of the outbreak, score highly on most indices of deprivation. Because they have not been vaccinated against measles, experts have warned that more children are expected to be diagnosed with fatal neurological complications from measles. These include subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), a rare neurodegenerative condition that usually appears around six to ten years after a measles infection. In the words of Professor Benedict Michael, a professor of neuroscience and chair of charity Encephalitis International’s scientific advisory panel “It’s a gradual but relentlessly progressive brain damage” and “Despite all of our drugs that we throw at it – immune drugs, antivirus drugs – it’s basically universally fatal.”[1]

Between 2000 and 2016, there were only five diagnoses of SSPE in the UK. Six children were diagnosed between 2017 and 2019 and experts such as Professor Ming Lim, a consultant paediatric neurologist at Evelina London Children’s Hospital, who has treated multiple children with SSPE, expect the number to rise. Prof Ming is certain that his junior resident colleagues will be taught to recognise SSPE purely because of this resurgence. In his words “If you see one case, you will never want to see another case of SSPE in your lifetime. It is a devastating condition.”[2]

The case of Sarah Walton is vivid example of the horrors of SSPE. She contacted measles at her nursery in 1979 at the age of 11 months, before children usually receive the vaccine. Her mother Jo reports that she recovered well but in 2004 at the age of 25 Sarah developed a myoclonic jerk – an involuntary spasm – that sometimes left her unable to walk. Eventually, she was diagnosed with SSPE and about two months later and a week before she was scheduled to wed her boyfriend, she suffered a massive seizure. In the words of her mother, “She went into the hospital walking and talking. And four weeks later, when she came out, she couldn’t speak and she couldn’t swallow.” Sarah required 24-hour care for the next 20 years and in February 2025, after several bouts of pneumonia, she died in her father’s arms.[3]

Measles: Risks And Protections

It may seem incredible to have to spell out what measles is and its attendant risks in an era where such diseases had been consigned to the medical history books but the long-term, cumulative effects of Dr Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent research on the supposed links between the MMR vaccine and autism; the incessant anti-vaccination misinformation pumped out by “alternative” health influencers and the resultant culture of vaccine hesitancy makes this an essential and potentially life saving task. Measles is a highly infectious viral illness that can spread very easily among people who are not fully vaccinated. It usually starts with cold-like symptoms, followed a few days later by a rash that starts on the face then spreads to the body. The spots, which are not usually itchy, are sometimes raised and join together to form blotchy patches.

Measles is spread when an infected person breathes, coughs, or sneezes. One case can generate 18 secondary infections. Nine out of ten non-vaccinated people will catch it if exposed. A person is infectious from when they first have symptoms (about four days before the rash appears) until four days after they get the rash. Health experts recommend opening windows and doors to help reduce its spread, frequent handwashing and immediately binning used tissues.

While many people recover, the risks of measles are serious complications such as pneumonia or brain inflammation. In rare cases, measles can result in long-term disability or death. Babies and people with weakened immune systems are more at risk. Measles can also cause miscarriage or stillbirth, premature birth, and low birthweight.[4]

There is no specific treatment for measles, only the vaccination to prevent catching it, which is part of the measles, rubella, varicella (MMRV) injection that replaced the MMR jab in the UK’s routine childhood programme last month.

Dimensions Of The Measles Crisis

Last month, the UK lost its measles-free status, granted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) where there has been an absence of endemic cases in a country for at least 12 months (isolated cases will always occur, but the transmission chain must be broken). In the UK, transmission did stop in 2016 and 2017 but restarted again in 2018. The pandemic brought another lull, but since 2023 transmission rates have risen alarmingly. In 2023 there were 481 cases, a dramatic spurt from 63 the previous year. In 2024, the outbreak rate hit quadruple figures with 3,681 UK-wide, with 2, 911 in England. Last year, outbreaks were smaller, amounting to 957 cases, but remained continuous. The majority of cases were in children aged 10 and under, and half were in London.[5]

Dr Vanessa Saliba, a consultant epidemiologist at the UKHSA describes how the return of measles “kicked off towards the end of 2023 with outbreaks in Birmingham and Coventry”. Through 2024 it “seeded virtually all the other regions in the country” but the largest outbreaks remained in Birmingham and London. She found that importation of measles found unvaccinated pockets and spread like wildfire. In January 2024, it was reported that more than 50 children had been admitted to Birmingham’s children’s hospital triggering the declaration of a national incident by the UKHSA.[6] The UKHSA has said modelling of a large measles outbreak in London suggests that between 40,000 and 160,000 people could be affected.[7]

Even in high-income regions, measles causes fatality in about one in 5,000 cases. There were two UK deaths in 2025: one an adult, one a child with an underlying immunological problem. In 2024 another child dies similarly; and four adults also died, one from the viral condition SSPE mentioned early, a fatal side-effect that emerges up to eight years after measles in about one in 50,000 cases. As also referred to previously, other complications of measles include severe diarrhoea, pneumonia, ear infection and hearing loss, blindness, and encephalitis (inflammation of the brain). 

In the case of two year old Ezra Barrett from Walsall who contracted measles in the West Midlands outbreak and who was rushed to A&E after the appearance of a rash on his body, the consultant struggled to insert an IV drip as “His body’s too shut down” due to his raging temperature and ended up being on high-flow oxygen. Ezra has recovered well after a week’s stay in hospital, but his speech is delayed and he is being monitored for hearing loss. His mother Davina Barrett also fears SSPE, and when she first shared Ezra’s story, she received messages challenging her, “saying it’s not true, that the MMR would not have helped Ezra.”[8]

This sadly not unknown anecdote leads to the nub of the contemporary measles resurgence: the critical drop-in vaccination rates and the explanatory factors. The WHO states that herd immunity driven by community-wide vaccination is the only way to prevent measles. This is high due to the very infectious nature of the disease, remaining contagious in the air or on surfaces for up to two hours. The first measles vaccination was offered in the UK in 1968, and the combined MMR vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella in 1988. Last month it switched to MMRV, including protection for varicella (chickenpox). It is offered in two doses, first at 12 months and, from last month, topped up at 18 months (formerly the top-up was scheduled when the child was three years and four months old). Having both doses gives immunity for about 99% of people. The UK’s average coverage in 2024 was 92.3% for the first dose, but 84.4% for the second, falling since the pandemic.[9]

Enfield has one of the lowest MMR vaccine uptake rates in the country, according to UKHSA figures from August 2025 that showed just 64.3% of five-year-olds in Enfield had received both doses of the vaccine in 2024-25. The Sunday Times reported that more than 60 cases of measles had been reported by seven schools and a nursery in Enfield. A message posted on the NHS Ordnance Unity Centre for Health GP surgery’s website described a fast-spreading measles outbreak.” It added: 

During this recent outbreak, one in five children have been hospitalised due to measles and all of them had not been fully immunised.[10]

The social demographics of the parts of Enfield, and indeed the West Midlands, that are being ravaged by the measles outbreaks – working class, BME preponderance, single parenthood – contrast so much with the New Age, Wellness Woo, Natural Health milieu in which the High Priest and Priestesses of the anti-vaccination movement reside – the grift economy of the faux sisterhood of wealthy white women with their pyramid business model for selling “alternative” health products, that it is tempting to view this ongoing public health disaster as a victory for the “pureblood” ideology of this anti-public health movement. The tragedy is that the bogus anti Big Pharma message they promote has found some traction, in the words of Prof Azeem Majeed, the head of primary care and public health at Imperial College, London, “among certain communities” which have “distrust of authority because of bad experience with councils, in health, education, welfare or housing.” For all the main factors likely to affect vaccine uptake are present in Enfield according to Prof Majeed – the prevalence of people from ethnic minorities who had also lower levels of education, deprivation, and how often people moved between different addresses and countries.

The MMR and autism has less purchase now; rather the main drivers of vaccine scepticism now is the wave of Covid 19 untruths disseminated by the Disinformation Dozen through social media and the influence of prominent US politicians such as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. However, compromised access to vaccines in areas of high deprivation must also be factored into the equation. Dr Saliba points to the major restructure of the NHS in 2013-14 which took away from health visitors the power to deliver vaccines. The year-on-year decline in vaccine take up overlapped with the austerity agenda which saw provision for health visitors and Sure Start centres, often venues for vaccinating, slashed. Boroughs like Hackney and Enfield are homes to diverse populations who need tailored engagement including translation services and cooperation of community resources such as mosques and temples with lots of communities.[11]

Finally, while no medicinal product is ever 100% free of side-effects, it is possible that vaccines have become “victims of their own successes” in that memories of the casualties of infectious diseases such as measles have faded. As anti-vaxxers promote their fairy tales of how natural immunity was gained by participation in measles or chicken pox parties, it is instructive to listen to the case of 60-year-old Alan Crowrher from Derbyshire who, born before the vaccine, caught measles when he was five; an experience he “felt normal.” However, the result was profound hearing loss and blindness caused by nerve damage. Today he has 15% of his hearing left. In his 30s, damaged optical nerves were diagnosed; he has 10% of his sight remaining. He has a simple message for parents reluctant to have their child vaccinated: “Come and sit with me.”[12]

References


[1] Phoebe Davis & James Tapper, 'Fears of rise in fatal brain disease as take-up of measles jab continues to fall.' The Observer. 22 February 2026 p.17

[2] Ibid

[3] Ibid.

[4] Andrew Gregory, 'Precautions. What are the risks and how do you protect your child.' The Guardian. 17 February 2026

[5] Emily Retter, 'The alarming return of measles.' The Guardian G2 16 February 2026 pp.4-5

[6] Ibid, p.5

[7] Rachel Hall, 'Measles outbreak in London spreading via unvaccinated children, watchdog confirms.' The Guardian. 16 February 2026

[8] Retter, p.5

[9] Ibid

[10] Hall, op cit

[11] Ibid

[12] Ibid

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Return Of The Pox 🪶 Measles Resurgence In The UK And The Revenge Of The Wellness World

Friendly Atheist ★ Dr. Kirk Milhoan is the head of the Republican-backed Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and he's completely out of his depth.

In a move that will ultimately harm ignorant Americans, the head of the Republican-backed Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices said this week that vaccines that fight polio and measles ought to be optional, flying in the face of all documented evidence.

The chair of that panel, Dr. Kirk Milhoan, said the right to refuse vaccines was more important than a mandate to protect public health.

In the case of an infectious disease, a personal choice to decline a vaccine may also affect others, including infants who are too young to be vaccinated or people who are immunocompromised. But a person’s right to reject a vaccine supersedes those risks, Dr. Milhoan said.

“If there is no choice, then informed consent is an illusion,” he said. “Without consent it is medical battery.”

To make sense of the decision, it helps to know more about Milhoan and why he’s on this panel at all. He’s an evangelical Christian pastor with a long history of promoting vaccine misinformation, which is why he was appointed to this vaccine advisory panel by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. 

Continue @ Friendly Atheist.

Pastor Who Rejects “Established Science” Decided Polio & Measles Vaccines Should Be Optional

Barry Gilheany ✍ In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s first election as US President and the Brexit referendum in 2016, there was much angst about how the world was entering the world of post-truth and fake news and how the tsunami of lies and misrepresentations that characterised both campaigns had damaged, perhaps terminally, the efficacy and legitimacy of journalism and other information gathering and disseminating institutions. 

In the eyes of the faux anti-elite contemporary Know Nothings, the “Mainstream Media” or MSM became a disease to be avoided in favour of the “alternative media” where those initiated in the esoteric knowledge and news stories that “they” (the government, public broadcasters, public health authorities etc) wanted to suppress, can get their fix. The coining of the phrase “alternative facts” by Kelly-Ann Conway, the presidential counsellor, in 2017 was emblematic of the firehose of falsehoods that Trump 1.0 launched from the White House. A booming MAGA media ecosystem amplified Trump’s lies and denials to such an extent that it appeared chillingly appropriate to apply to that moment Hannah Arendt’s observation in her 1952 book The Origins of Totalitarianism that:

the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … no longer exists.[1]

Fast forward eight years to Trump 2.0, the central problem appears to have metastasized into one of stupidity. There is agreement across political divides that this is the pathology that is affecting the current administration. In January, a column in The New York Times penned by the centrist columnist David Brooks titled “The Six Principles of Stupidity” observed it was “behaving in a way that ignores the question: What would happen next.” In the same newspaper in March, Hilary Clinton in an op-ed headlined “How Much Dumber Will This Get” stated that “It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me. It’s the stupidity.” In April, the Marxist writer and intellectual Richard Seymour in an essay posted as Stupidity as Historical Force quoted Trotsky: When the political curve goes down, stupidity dominates social thinking” – once the forces of reaction predominate, so reason gives way to insults and prejudice.[2]

The Signals breach of national security and advance of policies almost designed to cause grievous national harm such as tariffs and defunding of medical research. But the spectacle of a prominent vaccine sceptic and wellness crank, namely Robert F. Kennedy Jr, as Secretary for Health and Human Services adds a new dimension of institutional stupidity; it feels like an assault on human progress. The bans on fluoride in tap water, passed by legislators in Utah and Florida at RFK, Jr’s behest represent the negation of the very idea of evidence- based government.[3]

The Words and Wisdom of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr

A few anecdotes about RFK, Jr’s observations about health and policy based on them illustrate the qualitative step backwards that the US is taking under his tutelage. In the words of former Republican strategic operative Rick Wilson, he is a “heroin addict, sex addict, anti-vaccination lunatic and aspiring architect of millions of deaths” who is dedicated to replacing “real scientists with radical eugenicists”.[4] Similarly, Dr Demetre Daskalis, one of the distinguished scientists and medical experts who resigned from the CDC in protest over the anticipated replacement of Dr Susan Monarez by an anti-vax crank, detected the clear odour of eugenics when Kennedy casually referred to the “superior genetics” of the “very high” members of the Trump administration who enjoyed such “good health”.[5]

And why would these observers come to such stark conclusions? Consider Kennedy’s comments on H5NI bird flu, in the context of West Texas measles outbreak in which according to a bulletin issued by the Texas Department of State Health Services on 12th August 2025, 762 cases had been confirmed since late January, in which Dr Duskalakis quotes him as saying that:

getting the infection is fine, really, because only the strong will survive… All of the chickens should get bird flu and the ones that survive are genetically superior and they should reproduce in order to reestablish the flock.[6]

Consider this piece of folksy wisdom Kennedy enunciated when standing beside Texas Governor Abbott as MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) inspired health laws were signed. Claiming that he could detect serious illnesses in children just by glancing at them:

I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airport today, as I walk down the street and I see kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges with inflammation, you can see from their faces, from their body movements and from their lack of social connection and I know that’s how our children are not supposed to look.[7]

Lastly Kennedy, at the height of the Texan measles outbreak, in an interview with Fox News in March 2025 recycled a commonly held myth but deeply mistaken belief among alternative health devotees about the building up of  “natural immunity” to measles in childhood:

It used to be when I was a kid, that everybody got measles and the measles gave you lifetime protection against measles infection. The vaccine doesn’t do that. The vaccine is effective for some people for life but for many people it’s worse.[8]

Though it must be pointed out that RFK, Jr did row back on this scepticism and encouraged take up of the MMR vaccine.

In the words of Thom Hartmann, these beliefs and assumptions amount to a 21st century neo-eugenicist manifesto; a moral excuse for selfishness and Kennedy and Trump have found a way to wrap it in the language of health and liberty.[9] This scheme is also couched in the language of ignorance and stupidity.

Wellness Casualties

It is an unfortunate reality that there is a sizeable and increasing constituency crossing political divides for the kind of pseudoscience and medical charlatanism that Trump and Kennedy trade in such as the bogus link made last week between Tylenol and autism. We live in an age is where anti-vax celebrities such as the model Jenny McCarthy boast of deriving their knowledge from:

The University of Google'; where publications such as the magazine What Doctors Do Not Tell You and the bestselling book Good Energy (2024) authored by Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, with a chapter entitled.

Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor have fanned the flames of rebellion against the authority of health professionals per se. A rebellion which has its origins in the legitimate concerns of women especially against sexist and patriarchal health authority structures and cultures and also the sensible notion that individuals should take a responsible interest in self-care including diet, exercise and medical information now uses “lived experience” as clarion call over hard medicinal evidence.[10]

Accompanying and feeding into this rejection of mainstream medicine is the culture phenomenon of “conspirituality.” As Derek Benes, Mathew Reminski and Julian Walker write in their 2023 book Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, it represents “the handshake between hope and cynicism “. It welds the belief that our lives are being manipulated by hidden, all encompassing bad actors (Big Pharma, the Corporate Media) onto the comforting sensibility of the reiki healer, the homeopathic clinic, and the smoking teepee. They indulgence in self-care products, but also cloak-and-dagger political intrigue. They crave nurturance, but also dominance.[11]

But the mainstreaming of conspiracy theory and wellness woo-woo is having fatal consequences. In 2018, a study at Yale University of 1,000 patients with breast, prostrate, lung or bowel cancer showed that those used “complementary” treatments were twice as likely to die as those who did not (mostly because they delayed or refused conventional treatment.) A particularly harrowing and egregious case study of such waste of life was the case of 23 year-old Paloma Shemarani from Uckfield in East Sussex who died in 2024 after she refused - under the toxic influence of her mother Kate Sheramani a notorious conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer and deregistered nurse - conventional treatment after a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and opted for “five coffee enemas a day” according to her inquest held in August.[12] Serious consideration should thus be given to extend the remit of the UK’s POVA (Protection of Vulnerable Adults) to those who live under the care of individuals with such deranged and dangerous beliefs as Kate Sheramani.

These are the real-life casualties of the economy of idiocy, the business models of innumerable online influencers, celebrity brands such as Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop that validates hokum; of the Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) pyramid schemes in which wellness practitioners hawk their wares in a rigged market and those of Christina Northrup and Judy Mikovits and the other members of the Disinformation Dozen who while accounting for 80 per cent of the disinformation spewed out during the Covid pandemic according to a Centre for Countering Digital Hate report in March 2021 also collectively made millions of dollars in selling supplements and other snake oil products to their gullible clients.

But the major vector for wellness woo inflicted harm is opposition to vaccination. As I have previously written, where most rational and well-informed people see vaccination as social solidarity in action in that they represent not only self-protection and protection of others but the means of acquiring herd immunity against infectious diseases, opponents see them as an invasion of the body, a poison. A poison rushed into industrial-scale deployment by governments in league with Big Pharma and Big Tech.[13]

And the consequences of such pathological opposition to such medical innovation are easily quantifiable. A joint study in 2023 by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health estimated that between 30 May 2021 and 3 September 2022, at least 232,000 deaths in the US could have been prevented among unvaccinated adults. In June 2019, RFK, Jr visited Samoa, where the measles vaccine was being wrongly blamed for the deaths of two infants. After his visit, immunisation rates halved to 31%, more than 57,000 were infected and 83 died.[14] In many parts of the globe herd immunity levels against measles, mumps and rubella have dropped below the safety level of 95% due to the legacy of the unfounded scare about the triple jab.

The New Conspiracism

A framework for the mapping onto contemporary US politics and society of the macro stupidity that I have discussed is given by political scientists Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead in their analysis of the “new conspiracism.” Classic conspiracy theory (regarding for example the JFK assassination or the 9/11 attacks) rests on an overelaborate theoretical imagination, with complex causal chains, strategies, and alliances. Its toleration for coincidence and contingency is stunted while its claims for coherence and meaning are excessive. By contrast, the new conspiracism abolishes the need for and burden for explanation. Instead, there is repetition rather than evidence. It is all accusation and no evidence and substitutes social validation for scientific validation. To use Trump’s signature phrase, “if a lot of people are saying it, then it must be true.”[15]

The new conspiracism has its technological basis in digital platforms and the rise of reactionary influencers and “conspiracy entrepreneurs” of which the Disinformation Dozen of Covid denialists and conspiracists are classic examples. But while they identify enemies and reinforce prejudices, they do not explain anything, The only prerogative for the new conspiracist is to rack up the likes, shares, and reposting of their claims. Revenue raising is thus the name of the game.[16]

Rather than viewing absurd claims by Republican politicians and conspiracy entrepreneurs about immigration, tariffs and vaccines as lies, it may be more instructive to interpret them as the simple repetition of lines that have already been circulating, filtering outward from nodes – Trump and RFK Jr especially – in the conspiracist network. [17]

Such stupidity rather than mere individual pathology can be understood as a problem of social systems, as Andre Spicer and Mats Alvesson explore in their book The Stupidity Paradox. Stupidity, they write, can become “functional,” a feature of how organisations operate on a daily basis, obstructing ideas, and intelligence despite the palpable negative consequences. The wider canvass to this functionality of stupidity is that from the neoliberal critique of economic planning in the 1970s to Elon Musk’s Doge, political attacks on governmental and professional forms of authority serve the parallel project of opening space for overarching technologies of quantification, comparison, and evaluation. The underlying ideological rationale for “Big Data” is that its operation will happily render the theories, judgments, and explanations of human beings – with all their foibles, biases, and errors – redundant. The consequent outsourcing of judgement to financial markets, digital platforms and fusion of the two is also an invitation to people to behave stupidly, albeit within systems that are governed by some esoteric form of mathematical reason.[18] Think of the mathematical formula behind the Collateralized Debt Obligations which underwrote the global banking system’s support for the subprime mortgage market which led to the global financial collapse in 2008 and never trust the perfectibility of any outsourced and unregulated data system.

Ultimately, the best antidote to stupidity, is imagination which for Hannah Arendt is the uniquely human capacity to grasp truth via speculative drawing on empathy and creativity in the process as opposed to the dry scientific methods not amenable to human ingenuity.

References

[1] William Davies. A Critique of Pure Stupidity. The Guardian Long Read. 2 October 2025 pp.5-8

[2] Ibid, p.6

[3] Ibid

[4] Thom Hartmann. MAHA Madness. Bob Kennedy’s Cruel New Gospel of ‘Fitness.’ The Hartmann Report. 1 September 2025.

[5] Ibid

[6] Josh Fiallo. Ex-CDC Official Sounds Alarm on Major RFK, Jr ‘Red Flag.’ Daily Beast. 30 August 2025.

[7] Julia Ornedo. RFK Jr Shares Deeply Weird Way He Knows Kids are Unhealthy. Daily Beast 27 August 2025.

[8] Daily Beast, March 2025.

[9] Hartmann, op cit.

[10] Mathew D’Ancona. 'The Sick Age of Conspirituality.' The New World. 2 October 2025 pp.14-15.

[11] Ibid, pp.14-15

[12] Ibid, p.15

[13] Ibid

[14] Ibid, p.15

[15] Davies, p.8

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid

[18] Ibid

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Dumb And Dumber 🪶 The Political Economy Of Stupidity 🪶 The Case Study Of Vaccine Hostility And The Wellness Industry

Barry Gilheany ✍ Even for a zone so flooded, Steve Bannonesque style, with tidal waves of shit, Donald Trump’s advice last week to pregnant women not to take paracetamol, or Tylenol as it is known in the US, because of an alleged link to autism, represented a particularly point in the sedimentation of such faecal matter. 

It was so outrageous that, on learning of it, Wes Streeting, the UK Health Secretary, immediately dispensed with the kid gloves that his government have worn out of geopolitical necessity in its relationship with the rogue resident of the White House and advised that “there is no evidence to link the use of paracetamol by pregnant women to autism in their children, None”. Streeting went on to proclaim “don’t pay any attention whatsoever to what Donald Trump says about medicine. In fact, don’t even take my word for it as a politician - listen to British doctors, British scientists, the NHS.” 

Streeting’s headline making claim was complemented by a “flood the airwaves” strategy he and his Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) which they had begun to assemble the previous day. Weighing in was the National Autistic Society which criticised “the incessant misinformation about autism from President Trump and {US Health Secretary} Robert F. Kennedy Jr,''which would undermine decades of research and leave autistic people dismayed and frightened.'' These responses aligned with those issued by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and leading medical bodies in the US.[1]

However, the ongoing tragedy for those concerned with the resilience of public health systems be they medical practitioners, administrators, patients and friends and relatives of, is that the aforementioned politicians, Trump and RFK, Jr are listened to, whether in frightened hesitancy or with religious type devotion. For, as the old adage goes, when America sneezes the rest of the word catches a cold. In the case of health misinformation, America, or its wellness woo sector at any rate, has acted as a superspreader of the Post-Truth element of the Triple P virus. Last week’s Tylenol furore represents a concatenation of a number of regressive themes in health discourse: the disempowerment of women as autonomous actors in their pregnancy journey; the sanctification of “natural” processes over any sort of medical intervention; the pathologisation of autism as a disease to be “ cured” rather than the independent validation of those on the autistic (or wider neurodivergent) spectrums; the related “refrigerator mother” stereotype and the promotion of the “individual responsibility” theme in one’s health journey over public health provision.

It's Mum’s Fault Always

If men by some miracle could be pregnant, can you imagine the most powerful person in the world equipped with the least capacity for scientific knowledge of any world leader encouraging them to “tough out” during pregnancy? The answer to this brief thought experiment is in 99.99% of probabilities with no margin for error is rhetorical. Safe to say that at this moment anxiety and pain in pregnancy is not within the realm of the lived experiences of Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Mehmet Oz, former talk show host and head of the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services who all announced, on the basis of a spurious link with childhood autism, that pregnant women should cease taking paracetamol (known as acetaminophen or the brand name Tylenol in the US).

The political theatre surrounding Trump’s announcement forms part of the wider societal and longer historical background concerning women’s health. Pregnant women and their babies are routinely let down by partial, poor quality and missing medical evidence. Trump’s admonition “if you can’t tough it out “as a pregnant woman leaves them with treating their own pain and fever as their only option. This mistaken and cruel advice sets up a conflict between women’s needs against the best interests of their baby, rather than acknowledging the interdependence of women and foetus.[2]

It is almost moot to point out that analysis in Sweden in 2024 of a dataset of 2.5 million women who gave birth and their babies, found no association between paracetamol use in pregnancy and childhood neurodiversity. After additionally factoring in known risk factors for autism, the indication for taking paracetamol and family history of neurodiversity, a childhood autism risk from paracetamol exposure was not identified. Needless to say, Trump made no reference to this or any other contradictory evidence to his conclusion. I say moot in relation to the above study as many women, regardless of any scepticism towards the Trump administration’s approach to science, will feel burdened and anxious about baseless concerns about the effects of their choices on their pregnancy.[3] The delivery of misinformation will cause harm as pregnancy can be a state of anxiety with a heightened vigilance to protect the growing baby.[4] The anxiety quotient of pregnant women in the US will be increased by the advice from the Society of Maternal-Fetal Medicine that leaving the conditions of fever and pain can carry “significant maternal and infant health risks.”[5]

Trump’s fallacious claim contributes to the broader undermining of trust in science and the medical establishment which has further adverse impacts on the health of pregnant women. As Professor Sarah Hawkes, the co-founder of Global Health 50/50, a gender equality research initiative, says:

Pregnant women are already bombarded with a host of unsubstantiated information . . .  (which) . . .  “feeds into a narrative of distrust in science, which is really dangerous for women’s health, particularly in pregnancy.

Furthermore, for parents of autistic children, Hawkes adds, “you’ve introduced a huge amount of stigma and guilt when the scientific evidence just doesn’t bear that out.”[6]

Discouraging paracetamol use risks pushing women towards unlicenced treatments or alternative analgesia such as ibuprofen, which unlike paracetamol, poses proven risks in different trimesters, including miscarriage and kidney damage. For the doctor and psychiatry academic specialist Kate Womersley, the controversy around Trump’s Tylenol announcement is an opportunity to address the lacunae in medical research around the exclusion of pregnant women in studies of safety of medicines in pregnancy. To this end she and Ed Mullins, an obstetrician, are collaborating on Message Maternity -  a project to bring together healthcare researchers, research funders, medicine regulators, legal experts, and medical publishers and, most importantly, women themselves, to understand why those who are pregnant are routinely excluded from research, and how this culture can be changed.[7]

If there is a unifying theme running through Trumpian discourse on health, then it is the fetishisation of the ‘natural.’ They myth of what is ‘natural’ undergirds the renaissance of conservative ideas about the existential purpose of women into which Trump’s narrative feeds. This is often based on a fantasy of an evolutionary past, tradwife milking a cow or baking cookies, living under white male supremacy. The ‘natural’ order of things in this milieu could mean death in childbirth, and deadly diseases, such as measles and whooping cough.[8]

Such a ‘back to the future’ scenario for American women, if a ‘The Handmaids Tale’ one has become that bit more realistic since the removal of the Roe v Wade constitutional right to abortion in 2022 which Trump proudly “killed” and which has meant that women living in states where abortion is banned – including in cases of rape and incest – are more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth. The widespread cuts to National Institutes of Health (NIH) science and research grants will prevent scientists from working in such areas as perinatal mental health, women’s health and improving racial inequalities. In her book Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy and Childhood Lucy Jones finds that the average cost of having a baby in the US is around $19,000 and any kind of complication can raise that cost enormously.[9]

The ”appeal to nature”, or the idea that everything from the earth is better than anything human-made powers much of the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement of which Kennedy is the effective high priest.[10] Coated with a patina of faux libertarian concerns about bodily choice and the Deep State and faux radicalism over the iniquity of Big Pharma, the longest and most persistent bete noire of MAHA and its ideological predecessors is vaccination. Similar dynamics can be observed in the Catholic Church’s traditional opposition to artificial contraception and abortion on the grounds that it interferes with the natural course of pregnancy and the demonisation of ‘conspiracist’ and ‘globalist’ bodies such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation. It is hardly coincidental that moral and ethical opposition to contraception and abortion resided on the Church doctrine of Natural Law.

The explicitly sexist and patriarchal meaning of ‘natural’ in MAHA world is laid bare in the steps that the administration has taken to undermine pregnant women’s access to Covid vaccines and antidepressants. In May, Kennedy said that the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would no longer recommend that healthy pregnant women get Covid vaccinations. At a panel about antidepressant use during pregnancy hosted by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), staffed by antidepressant sceptics, one panellist, a psychologist named Roger McFillin, offered this pearl of wisdom “Are women just naturally experiencing their emotions more intensely? Those are gifts, not symptoms of a disease.”[11]

Enter the theory of “maternal imagination”, which believed that pregnant women could change the foetus with their minds and thus congenital disorders were the fault of the mother, to Bruno Bettleheim’s “refrigerator mother” hokum which blamed “cold” mothers for giving their children autism, men saying stupid stuff based on their “feelings” is dangerous.[12]

The discursive meanings of the Trump’s administration’s drive to restrict pregnant women’s access to Tylenol from the steady drift in America towards autocracy in the age of Trump 2.0. Authoritarian governments have always sought to “naturalise” the construction of pregnancy in order to subjugate women and ensure they are reliable sources of reproduction. That’s why the Tylenol announcement cannot be divorced from the Trump administration’s encouragement of women, in the manner of Viktor Orban regime in Hungary, to have more babies through $5,000 (£3,700) “baby bonuses”. This pronatalist agenda means in the words of Amy Larocca, author of a forthcoming book analysing the genderised, racialised and classist dynamics of the wellness industry titled How to be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time, that in the midst of all “this pressure to become a mother … emerging politically … you’re not supposed to need any help or support. No maternity leave, no medical care, no support.”[13] Truly if men could get pregnant …

The Political Economy And Global Effects Of RFK Jr’s Great American Health Wrecking Ball

Related to the ill-disguised war on women’s health needs and agency that the Tylenol announcement is the macro agenda for the dismantling of public health provision in the US that RFK Jr as Health Secretary is presiding over. It is also a case study of the intersection of wellness woo capitalism with the deregulatory regime in health that RFK, Jr is implementing.

As a former chair of the anti-vaccine, non-profit Children’s Health Defence (CHD), anti-vaxxers were salivating for his appointment as Health Secretary but hardliners were angered when he settled on Tylenol as a “cause” of autism rather than more traditional targets such as aluminium, thimerosal or MMR. However, an Observer investigation reveals that Kennedy and other close associates of Trump have been critical of acetaminophen for years and have cultivated deep connections to organisations that sell or promote “natural” pain relief and who could benefit financially if women turned away from Tylenol towards unproven remedies.[14]

The CHD has spent years raising concerns that Tylenol could increase autism risk, both in pregnancy and during early years. CHD has also received funding from supplement companies selling non-medical pain relief. These included Earthley Wellness, an Ohio-based company which sells a “pain potion” containing “absolutely no acetaminophen … or other junk.” [15]

Earthley has donated at least $5,000 to the CHD and published a blog titled''10 Reasons You Should Reconsider Using Acetaminophen.'' CHD also received sponsorship from Dr Green Mom, another supplement company which recommends pregnant women take magnesium or ginger instead. While certain herbs have been found to treat pain, there is little evidence to validate all-purpose “potions” like Earthey’s offering.[16]

The nexus of connections between Kennedy, his close circle and the Trump administration to non-medical treatments grows and thickens. Last December, Kennedy transferred ownership of the trademark application for his slogan Make America Healthy Again to a company managed by Del Bigtree, a prominent anti-vaxxer who ran Kennedy’s 2024 presidential election campaign. Bigtree’s company has since applied to expand the trademark to use MAHA branding to sell vaccines, supplements, and vitamins. “It does appear that women who take Tylenol have a higher risk of autism,” Bigtree opined in a 2022 video.[17]

“America’s doctor,'' Dr Mehmet Oz, who flanked Trump last week and who was chosen by Trump to run the federal agency overseeing the Medicare and Medicaid services also was a “global adviser and stakeholder” for the global e-commerce supplement company iHerb. Oz heavily promoted iHerb’s “natural” pain relief formulas and other products on social media while running TV segments with titles such as “Hidden Acetaminophen Danger.” In the 24 hours after Trump’s announcement web search interest in iHerb spiked though Dr Oz has appeared to row back on Trump’s claim by telling an interviewer that women should “take it when it’s appropriate”.[18]

Once again, the web of links of anti-vaccine activists from Andrew Wakefield to the Disinformation Dozen who flooded the internet with falsehoods about Covid vaccines during the pandemic to the snake oil economy of bogus health supplements and alternative medicinal practices and the monetisation of lies and misinformation to the latest autism “cure” has been laid bare by proper investigative journalism. But in another example of the degradation of the genuinely great American institution; the rest of the world suffers from the Make America Sick Again (for those dependent on public health functioning). The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), founded in 1946 and which played such as a critical role in the eradication of smallpox, almost wiping out of polio, containment of the Ebola virus in Africa and in dealing with the HIV/AIDS crisis, faces a hollowing out to such an extent that it is no longer capable of protecting America from the next pandemic say staff.[19]

Since assuming control of the FDA, National Institutes of Health and the CDC in February, Kennedy has cut US support or Gavi, which distributes vaccines to the world’s poorest children; cut the CDC’s HIV prevention programmes and sacked the CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, which draws up the agency’s list of recommended vaccines, and replaced it with a handpicked panel and in August he fired Susan Monarez, the CDC’s director , who said she was sacked “for holding the line on scientific integrity.”[20]

Dismissed for holding the line scientific or legal or historical or epistemic integrity or integrity in all conceivable walks of life. A suitable epitaph for the country that freely choose to take the path leading to autocracy and state sanctioned ignorance and obscurantism.

References

[1] Denis Campbell, ‘People trust authority.’ Experts fight back against Trump’s false health advice.’ The Guardian. 27th September 2025.

[2] Kate Womersley, 'Trump’s autism claims exploit pregnancy fears.' The Guardian, 27th September 2025.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Lucy Jones. 'First they came for the paracetamol – will epidurals be next?' The Observer, 28th September 2025.

[5] Carter Sherman, 'Unfounded claim is latest move in effort to glorify the ‘natural’ – often at the expense of women.' The Guardian, 27th September 2025.

[6] Hannah Devlin & Ian Semple. 'Factcheck Maternal painkiller use and autism in children.' The Guardian. 24th September 2025 p.13.

[7] Kate Wormersley, op cit.

[8] Lucy Jones, op cit.

[9] Lucy Jones, op cit.

[10] Carter Sherman, op cit.

[11] Sherman, op cit.

[12] Jones, op cit.

[13] Sherman, op cit.

[14] Alexi Mostrous, 'Trump sounds false alarm on pain relief drug – and Kennedy’s allies look set to profit.' The Observer. 28 September 2025 pp.16-17.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Stephen Armstrong & Ada Barume, 'Kennedy’s staff warn that he is dismantling US public health.' The Observer. 28 September 2025 p.15

[20] Ibid.

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Painkillers, Pregnancy And Autism 🪶 Quackery Plays Its Biggest Trump Card So Far

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