The Stupid Is Approaching Escape Velocity

If the result of your political philosophy is needless death from preventable illness, of what use is your political philosophy?

All vaccine recommendations are being reconsidered by the US's vaccines committee, according to its top adviser, who in recent interviews slammed vaccination requirements for attending school and said vaccines should be taken on the advice of an individual's doctor.

The stance from Kirk Milhoan, chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), represents a dramatic departure for the group tasked with making US vaccine recommendations for decades, signaling an increasingly hostile approach from the Trump administration to routine vaccines.

The childhood vaccine schedule is undergoing radical changes under the purview of Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and longtime vaccine critic. Some of these changes are being led by his handpicked vaccine advisers, several of whom have expressed outsized fears of the very rare risks of side-effects of vaccines compared with the benefits of protecting against illness, hospitalization and death supported by decades of evidence.

Significant additional changes may be made to the childhood immunization schedule this year, Milhoan, who is a pediatric cardiologist, told the New York Times last week. ACIP may "not necessarily" change the recommendations for all vaccines to become optional, but the committee is "reevaluating all of the vaccine products including risks and benefits", Milhoan said.

In a separate interview on the podcast Why Should I Trust You?, which was released last Thursday, Milhoan said that he supported individuals over the collective public and framed vaccine debates as "autonomy versus public health".

"There's always going to be a tension between what is supposedly good for all and what is good for the individual," Milhoan said.

That was a false dichotomy, said Jason Schwartz, associate professor of health policy and management at the Yale School of Public Health, because vaccines provide protection both for individuals and for those who come into contact with them.

"It's often portrayed as this idea of the greater good, but it's an individual benefit that also provides a lot of good for our communities," he said.

Ah, yes, supporting individuals over the collective public. And what is that getting us, may I ask? Measles, it turns out. It's getting us measles.

The measles outbreak in the US is reaching new heights, with 416 cases confirmed already this year, compared with 2,255 confirmed cases last year, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The US is already at about one-fifth of 2025's cases after only three weeks of 2026 – and last year was the worst outbreak in three decades.

Milhoan seemed to see the rapid growth as an opportunity to understand how dangerous measles is for unvaccinated people.

"What we're going to have is a real-world experience of when unvaccinated people get measles. What is the new incidence of hospitalization? What's the incidence of death?" he said on the podcast.

Elizabeth Jacobs, professor emerita at the University of Arizona and a founding member of Defend Public Health, said Milhoan "wants to experiment on the people of the United States by seeing what happens as vaccination coverage plummets and infectious diseases spread".

"This is so dangerous as to approach criminality," she added.

Milhoan framed vaccination recommendations as giving families "no choice" and likened it to "medical battery" in the Times article. All vaccination is already optional in the US. The US government has never mandated any shots for children. The independent advisers of ACIP are tasked with making evidence-based recommendations, which the CDC may or may not take up.

In a conversation between characters Bill Gorton and Mike Campbell in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Bill asks Mike how he went bankrupt, to which Mike responds: "Two ways, gradually and then suddenly."

And so it seems the same can be said about how Americans have gotten so stupid: gradually and then suddenly. Gradually, by killing off the humanities and sciences, newspapers and magazines, anything that didn't entertain us, and surrendering ourselves to the algorithms and fever dreams of dipshit billionaire techbros. And now suddenly, by deciding, for example, that we'd like to see what measles can do even though we developed the measles vaccine precisely because we saw what measles can do and didn't much like what we saw.

We are free range now, we humans, or at least we Americans, out here in the universe, floating dimly, luxuriating in our stupidity as if we're the first people to exist.

Geology. Biology. Anthropology. History. Literature. What are those things when I feel these other things, see? See, if I feel something strongly, then it must be true. And if you feel something strongly, well, that's just as true as my truth, unless, of course, your truth threatens my truth, in which case, I'll enforce my truth with the barrel of a gun.

Neil deGrasse Tyson said recently that he "persistently dream[s] of a world where objective truths are what shape people's politics, rather than politics shaping what people think are objective truths."

That's a beautiful dream. I dream it, too. The only problems, as I see them, are our history, our society, and our animal drive to remain as stupid as possible in the name of a freedom that isn't freedom at all.