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Ashley St Clair

NTBCW GRIMES DJ

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https://zeteo.com/p/this-ex-maga-influencer-silenced-ashley-st-clair

discord chat coorrd msg get paid, trump kids eric? wh comms

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them

Ashley St. Clair, the mother of Elon Musk’s child Romulus, is speaking out against the billionaire’s treatment of his daughter Vivian Wilson on social media.

On Sunday, Musk re-circulated previous language that he had used to refer to Wilson, including misgendering her, by saying on X, “The woke mind virus killed my son.” He had previously used similar language on a 2024 podcast appearance when he told right-wing provocateur Jordan B. Peterson that Wilson had been “killed by the woke mind virus.”

Seemingly fed up with Musk dragging his children into the public arena, St. Clair — who began dating Musk in 2023 and gave birth to Romulus in 2024 — clapped back on her Instagram account. In an Instagram Story captured by Radar Online, St. Clair posted a screenshot of Musk’s tweet about the “woke mind virus” and asked why he would continue to “endanger” his children by speaking negatively about them on social media.

“Whenever Elon tweeted at / about me, the threats against my family have always increased. This is true whether it is negative or positive,“ St. Clair wrote. “Elon is aware that he has this impact, particularly on those he posts negatively about. The guy has a 24/7 army of security.”

She continued, “Now why in the fuck when you know this would you repeatedly harass and target your OWN CHILD on the platform you own? I am just sick of this shit. I am sick of pretending like any of this is ok. I am sick that I enabled individuals who think it's acceptable for a grown ass man to endanger the life of his child because he is so angry at this adult child having a life of her own.”

She added, “Even if you are a delusional MAGAt who believes in the trans panic, Why do you think it is okay for a father to knowingly endanger the life of their child?”

After previously spouting anti-trans beliefs and penning the 2023 children’s book Elephants Are Not Birds, St. Clair apologized for her public embrace of transphobic ideology in January, saying she felt “immense guilt for my role,” including potentially causing “my son’s sister more pain,” referencing Wilson.

“Idrk how to make amends for many of these things but I have been trying incredibly hard privately to learn + advocate for those within the trans community that I’ve hurt,” St. Clair wrote on social media in January. “I also haven’t said much on this bc I have gone back and forth over whether my voice would be helpful on the issue since it will be framed as disingenuous or just turning bc I’m ‘scorned.’”

Musk responded shortly after St. Clair’s January post by stating that he might seek full custody of their son, Romulus, because her support for trans ideology meant that she was “implying she might transition a one-year-old boy.”

In her most recent anti-Musk posts, St. Clair said that at least part of the reason the Tesla CEO continues to attack Wilson is jealousy, saying he is “just mad that Vivian is a million times cooler than he will ever be. Stop putting hits on her head.”

Despite her father’s seeming insistence on criticizing her, Wilson has been living her best life. In June, she debuted her drag persona Vivllainous and recently appeared in the new Katseye music video “Pinky Up.”

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wapo

Inside a MAGA influencer’s turn against the right-wing machine

Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Elon Musk’s children, has renounced her life as a pro-Trump provocateur.

May 7, 2026

Ashley St. Clair, a mother to one of Elon Musk’s children, has renounced her life as a pro-Trump provocateur. (Video: Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)

By Drew Harwell

Few MAGA influencers were as committed to the digital cause as Ashley St. Clair.

The 27-year-old former brand ambassador for the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA published an anti-transgender children’s book, appeared prime-time on Fox News and posted selfies from President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate....$

ggl 5 26

AI Overview

Ashley St. Clair is a political commentator and author who built a massive social media following as a prominent MAGA and conservative influencer, but has recently undergone a major political shift. While she is not affiliated with the student organization Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), her recent public evolution involves the broader American right-wing. [1, 2, 3]

Conservative Background

Recent Political Evolution

For a closer look at the right-wing influencer machinery she recently walked away from, here is a video where St. Clair discusses her former role in the movement:

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newrep

The Ex-MAGA Influencer Who Now Hates All Things MAGA—and Herself Too
Ashley St. Clair used to hang with Erika Kirk. And she bore Romulus, the zillionth child of Elon Musk. She’s now turned her back on MAGA—and wants to tell you all about it.

Ashley St. Clair at an event in West Hollywood, California, in March

IFrame Content

Ashley St. Clair is a gonzo MAGA influencer turned gonzo ex-MAGA influencer who is also known for having mothered a child with Elon Musk in 2023. She is a college student. She is 27.

For the last few months, St. Clair has been posting to TikTok about her escape or exile from the MAGA carnies. She sums it up this way: “I became a cringe MAGA influencer for 8 years before I found my brain.” Now she is ready to “talk about my experience within this machine of MAGA” and “speak about the inside of a system that nobody else is.”

Though she makes serious reference to having renounced her previous creed and making earnest amends, St. Clair is mostly conducting her multipart exposé with Catskills-style comedy. She’s well suited to it, as she resembles a young Fran Drescher, and has something of Drescher’s manner, manicures, and nasality.

In this costume, St. Clair delivers MAGA lore and tea to an increasingly intrigued audience. You might call this a redemption tour, except that her shtick is that she’s way, way beyond redemption.

And lately she’s been drawing viewers in with the four words that have become a favorite opener on the app: “Get ready with me.”

To her following, this curtain-raiser signals that St. Clair will put on a millefeuille of makeup in a sublimely expert way, transforming herself from girlish smart aleck to indomitable broad, all while dishing about the women of Mar-a-Lago, the right-wing media group Arsenal, “the rack on Kristi Noem’s husband,” the “Stop the Steal” hoax, the former North Carolina Representative Madison Cawthorn, Benny Johnson, Alex Jones, and how MAGA influence campaigns work.

Why is this at allcompelling? I think it comes through in the makeup application itself, as this exhausted and broken-hearted young woman, who has both engineered suffering and suffered herself, self-consciously masks her extreme fragility with extreme bravado. St. Clair is clearly experiencing a form of how-did-I-get-here despair that mirrors the nation’s. In one video (now unfindable) she contrasted images of her heavily made-up self with her private one—raw, red-faced, sobbing.

I find her both insightful and untrustworthy. “Bitch, I’m at rock bottom,” she posted. “There’s not an embarrassed bone in my body. I care about literally nothing.”

So here’s the rock bottom she’s referring to. In 2023, St. Clair’s relationship with Musk rocketed from their D.M.s to her pregnancy to his madness. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” Musk texted St. Clair about his breeding plan for her, according to*The Wall Street Journal*, “we will need to use surrogates.”

Not long after, St. Clair announced the birth of their son Romulus on X, and named Musk as the father. He had evidently hoped to keep this quiet. A beef ensued. “You withdrew most of [the child support] to maintain control and punish me for ‘disobedience,’” St. Clair tweeted at Musk, saying she was facing eviction.

Musk then decided St. Clair had somehow entrapped him, and went insane. A tsunami of horrific, pornographic, xAI-generated images of St. Clair as a minor hit X. St. Clair sued xAI. Now xAI has bashed back. Or rather, as she puts it, “my ex’s fuck-ass racist robot company is suing me.”

For a new mother in precarious circumstances to go toe-to-toe with Musk, the RMITW, took cojones. To do so on Musk’s own Satan-site, and in the presence of his zillion bloodthirsty acolytes—this gives you a sense of St. Clair’s risk nonaversion.

So she took her rock bottom to TikTok. When she arrived, she mostly lip-synched to internet memes. These videos are surprisingly funny, and she still does them. But only last August when she warned about Palantir, and the dangers of “simping for the military-industrial complex,” did she get true engagement. These days, some 70,000 of us are following.

The tea is hot, as they say. The apparent debauchery, recklessness, and casual brutality of some of the nation’s leading conservatives is really something. St. Clair chips off jokes about everything she did and had done to her in her early twenties, and her tough-as-nails posture is, by design, only half-persuasive.

Then St. Clair can also turn downright somber, as in a video last week. In this one (now removed), St. Clair addressed Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie who had just released a weird video of her own. St. Clair urged Kirk to log off the internet for a time and get better people to advise her. St. Clair then thought better of the post and took it down. “As a mother,” she said in the next video, she didn’t want to encourage people to “dogpile” on Kirk.

Once a “brand ambassador” for Turning Point USA, St. Clair also wanted to underscore in this follow-up video that she vehemently opposes the ideology of the Kirks—and the whole movement she once embraced. To this end, she has taken her name off an anti-trans children’s book she published a few years ago. She further aims to take responsibility for having, as she says, dehumanized the trans community—and so many others.

“I encourage people within MAGA to really look at what’s happening in this country and what you’re a part of,” she said in a Get Ready With Me video last Friday, with apparent anguish. She went on to say she’s not a grifter or a makeup influencer. She hopes, in fact, to go to law school one day.

“I am speaking openly and honestly about my experiences. I understand that there’s a lot of skepticism and critique, and I am open to that, and I am understanding that there are a lot of people that are still going to be angry at me. And I don’t fault them for that because of my role in harm.”

Gen Z MAGA—how will we ever understand you? The sincerity crossed with the oddball memes with the deep suffering with the mean-girl zingers. But the GRWM video was done. The makeup was done. In the captions, St. Clair had helpfully included a 15-item cosmetics product list, including Rare Blush in Wisdom, Nars Blush in Dolce Vita, and One Size Liner in Outta Line. What a mess. But maybe the list held a clue to Ashley’s, MAGA’s, or even America’s trajectory. Dolce Vita to Outta Line to some Wisdom at last? What was I doing? I finally scrolled away.

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crap site White House Deputy Chief Caught in Chat Scandal | Conservative America Today

White House Deputy Chief Caught in Chat Scandal

Former MAGA insider Ashley St. Clair accuses Trump administration officials of scripting conservative influencers through a secret “Fight Fight Fight” group chat, but zero evidence backs the explosive claim.

Story Snapshot

St. Clair’s Unsubstantiated Allegations

Ashley St. Clair released a TikTok video post-White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2025 claiming MAGA influencers use a “Fight Fight Fight” group chat. She named White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair as a member. St. Clair pointed to multiple influencers posting identical messages demanding Trump get “his ballroom.” Her argument relies on the statistical improbability of such synchronization without coordination. No screenshots, recordings, or chat logs support her story. James Blair issued no public response.

IFrame Content

Government Chat Precedent Provides Context

A March 2025 leak exposed a U.S. government Signal group chat discussing classified Houthi operations. The Atlantic published transcripts on March 24 and 25, prompting a Pentagon investigation by April 3. This incident proves high-level officials use encrypted group chats for coordination. White House officials acknowledged the leak’s authenticity. However, that case involved national security, not influencers. St. Clair’s claims draw on this precedent without linking direct evidence.

IFrame Content

Weaknesses Undermine Credibility

Research confirms St. Clair made the allegations and influencers posted similar content. Yet core claims lack proof: no “Fight Fight Fight” chat contents leaked, no financial ties documented, no other insiders corroborate. Statistical probability arguments fail without accounting for shared news sources or natural alignment among Trump supporters. Political communication experts note synchronization often reflects common values, not scripting. Extraordinary accusations demand extraordinary evidence, which remains absent.

Broader Frustrations with Elites and Media

Americans across the spectrum distrust elites controlling narratives, whether deep state bureaucrats or scripted influencers. Conservatives value independent voices challenging liberal media monopolies built over decades. Unproven claims like St. Clair’s risk eroding trust in genuine MAGA support during Trump’s second term. Both sides agree government prioritizes power over people. True transparency demands facts, not innuendo that divides patriots focused on America First policies.

IFrame Content

Status Remains Unresolved

As of May 2026, no congressional or DOJ investigation targets the allegations. Mainstream coverage stays limited, with commentary dominating discourse. Influencer-government ties face general scrutiny post-2025 leak, but specific claims linger unverified. Common practices like press releases evolved into digital coordination long before Trump. Distinguishing organic support from coercion requires verifiable proof, highlighting why skepticism prevails among discerning conservatives wary of elite manipulations.

Sources:

Wikipedia – U.S. Government Group Chat Leaks

Wonderwall – MAGA Response: President Donald Trump Assassination Attempt Fake/Staged, Ashley St. Clair Says

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not much talk 5 26

In my view it is undue weight for the following long tweet on X (formerly Twitter) to be highlighted:

"I feel immense guilt for my role. And even more guilt that things I have said in the past may have caused my son’s sister more pain. Idrk how to make amends for many of these things but I have been trying incredibly hard privately to learn + advocate for those within the trans community that I’ve hurt. I also haven’t said much on this bc I have gone back and forth over whether my voice would be helpful on the issue since it will be framed as disingenuous or just turning bc I'm "scorned." Even this reply will become right wing hysteria but yeah I am sorry. Let me know how I can help."

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ashley St. Clair (born July 31, 1998) is an American influencer, author, and political commentator.[1][2] She was an outspoken proponent of conservative and anti-transgender politics. She and Elon Musk had a child together in 2024. In 2026, she denounced her previous anti-trans activism.

Career

St. Clair was a longtime writer for the right-wing satirical news site The Babylon Bee and served as a brand ambassador for Turning Point USA. She became an outspoken proponent of right-wing ideologies and made appearances on Fox News to talk about declining birth rates.[3]

She has amassed over one million followers on Twitter and has endorsed President Donald Trump.[4] St. Clair wrote the children's book Elephants Are Not Birds, which she billed as an unapologetic rebuke of transgender acceptance, and which was published by the Christian conservative BRAVE Books. The book follows Kevin the Elephant as he "learns that even though he can sing, he is not a bird, even if Culture insists that he is".[4][3][2]

Political shift

In January 2026, St. Clair expressed remorse for her previous anti-trans activism in a response to criticism by American Twitter user Junlper, saying "I feel immense guilt for my role", in particular towards her child's half-sister, Vivian Wilson. She wrote how she has been "trying incredibly hard privately to learn + advocate for those within the trans community that I've hurt" and expressed she did not know how to make amends.[5][2] Musk responded by filing for full custody of their son, saying her apology implied she might try to "transition a one-year old boy."[6][7][8] Also in January 2026, St. Clair stated that politically she identifies as "dark woke".[9]

Personal life

St. Clair is Jewish.[10][11] She attended the University of Colorado Colorado Springs before dropping out.[12] St. Clair has two children in total: her son with Musk, and another son from a previous relationship.[3]

Relationship with Elon Musk

St. Clair first met Twitter owner Elon Musk on the site in 2023 and began exchanging direct messages with him.[4][3] She gave birth to Musk's son in 2024.[13] Musk was not on the child's birth certificate and had been unresponsive to St. Clair's messages despite previously acknowledging paternity in writing. Musk met their son on September 21, 2024, and spent two hours with him, followed by one hour the next day, then met him again for 30 minutes on November 30, 2024, and continued texting St. Clair thereafter.[4]

On February 14, 2025, St. Clair publicly acknowledged the child's existence and Musk's paternity. On March 31, she sold her Tesla, which she said was because her child support payments had been cut by 60% as punishment by Musk for "disobedience".[4] She sought full custody over their son and described the battle with Musk as "unplanned career suicide" and "a gap in my LinkedIn profile that can't be legally explained". St. Clair started a podcast to avoid an imminent eviction.[6]

St. Clair became a target for abuse from supporters of Musk. After the rollout of Twitter's Grok image-editing feature, St. Clair reported being deluged with images of herself that had been AI-edited to show her naked and in sexual positions, including some based on photos when she was underage. She said both Musk and Twitter did nothing to counteract the images.[1][14] She filed suit in New York State against xAI for punitive and compensatory damages.[15][16]

See also

References

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The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com › technology › 2026 › 05 › 07 › ashley-st-clair-trump-online-machine

Ex-MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair turns against the pro-Trump machine ...

May 7, 2026Once a prominent pro-Trump provocateur, Ashley St. Clair now claims to expose how top MAGA creators coordinate messaging and turn political outrage into profit.

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Ashley St. Clair,

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/12/27/leprosy_polio_malaria_tb_measles__and_massive_unscreened_illegal_immigration_1000817.html

pdate, March 2024:

Tuberculosis Cases Are Surging in California, Newsweek

Chicago Evicts Migrants as Measles Cases Spread, Fox News

By James Varney, RealClearInvestigations

December 27, 2023

Successful public health campaigns and medical advances have enabled the United States to conquer a range of disfiguring and damaging diseases. Polio, which paralyzed thousands of Americans annually, was wiped out by widespread vaccinations. In 1999 the nation’s last hospital for lepers closed its doors in Louisiana. A global campaign eradicated smallpox, while lethal tuberculosis, the “consumption” that stalked characters in decades of literature, seemed beaten by antibiotics. Measles outbreaks still occur from time to time, but they are small, local, and easily contained.

AP

Vaccination in Pakistan, one of two countries where polio is still endemic. The other is Afghanistan, source of an estimated 90,000 taken into the U.S. since America's chaotic 2021 withdrawal.

AP

Recently, however, some of these forgotten but still formidable infectious diseases have begun to reappear in the U.S. For two years running, polio has been detected in some New York water samples, and this fall, leprosy re-emerged in Florida, where cases of malaria have also been recorded.

Health officials say they are not sure why these and other infectious diseases are resurfacing. One distinct possibility, which officials are loath to discuss, is that the millions of migrants who have crossed into the country in recent years could be bringing the scourges with them, since many are from countries where such rare diseases persist and vaccination programs are not robust.

RCP

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: “The recent polio and leprosy cases are almost certainly imports to the U.S.”

RCP

“The recent polio and leprosy cases are almost certainly imports to the U.S.,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and scientist at Stanford University, one of the most outspoken critics of official COVID-19 narratives in the last pandemic that later proved flawed.

And the Biden administration, an aggressive promoter of often mandatory vaccination last time, now is offering little public comment on the connection between disease and the porous borders with which its immigration policy has become widely identified.

Neither the Centers for Disease Control nor the Department of Homeland Security would discuss the issue with RealClearInvestigations. Legal immigrants are required to receive vaccinations for a host of diseases, but the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged it does not have vaccination records for the millions who have entered the U.S. since the Biden administration relaxed border controls upon taking office in January 2021.

“It’s not like there is some Typhoid Mary out there, but this is something people are seeing and thinking about, even if they don’t want to discuss it publicly,” said Art Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes the Biden administration’s border policies.

AP

"Operation Allies Welcome" in Idaho: some of the 90,000 Afghan arrivals from a polio-afflicted land.

AP

The reticence of federal agencies has not stopped some local officials, however, from raising public health alarms over massive immigration. New York City Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan warned in April that at least half of the migrants who have poured into the city had not been vaccinated against polio. The potentially paralyzing and life-threatening virus remains endemic in two countries in the world, Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to the World Health Organization. Since President Biden ordered what proved to be a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, an estimated 90,000 Afghans have come to the U.S. under the terms of Operation Allies Welcome.

publichealth.columbia.edu

Ashwin Vasan, New York City Health Commissioner: Half of migrants are not vaccinated against polio.

publichealth.columbia.edu

It is not clear if those migrants met the polio vaccination requirement. DHS did not respond to a question about whether medical histories were reviewed in the fast-tracked entry of Afghans who got out of their country before the Taliban reimposed its control.

Vasan’s warning pointed directly to the southern border, which has seen record-shattering arrivals on the Biden administration’s watch.

“More than 50,000 people have come to New York City in the past year shortly after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border,” he wrote in an 11-page letter. “I am writing now to underscore how critical it is that health care providers take a wide range of considerations into account when working with people who are seeking asylum.”

Citing outbreaks of chickenpox in shelters for illegal immigrants, Vasan also noted the arrival of newcomers who either began their journey in a country where tuberculosis is present or passed through such countries en route to the U.S.

The New York City Health Department did not respond to questions from RealClearInvestigations or to a request to speak with Dr. Vasan, but the numbers have only grown since he sent his letter. Since spring 2022, more than 100,000 migrants had arrived in the city, and more than 67,200 were living in taxpayer-funded housing at the end of November, according to the New York Times.

March of Dimes Foundation

Poster girl, 1957: The poliovirus, long extinct in the U.S, is again being monitored by federal health authorities, via wastewater testing.

March of Dimes Foundation

Last year, the first recorded polio case in the U.S. since 2013 was diagnosed in New York State, with the victim described only as an “unvaccinated man.” Also in 2022, poliovirus was found in the water supply of four New York counties, including Long Island, and New York City. Another positive test result was recorded in Rockland County this year, according to the state.

In the U.S., polio vaccinations remain part of “the routine childhood immunization process” under which the CDC recommends four doses. Adults who grew up in the U.S. are vaccinated, the agency said.

The last occurrence prior to the New York diagnosis had been in 1979. Since November 2022, the CDC has begun wastewater testing for the poliovirus, so long extinct in the U.S., in selected areas, but the agency did not respond to questions about those investigations. It does provide information on COVID and monkeypox, the latter a disease that primarily afflicts the gay population.

A thorough investigation, exploring all avenues of transmission and trying to source a virus to its root, is common among virus hunters, and the idea that millions of people coming to the U.S. could inadvertently carry with them some infectious disease is but one possibility. For example, thus far researchers have been unable to pinpoint where the infamous Ebola virus originates in equatorial Africa.

'Historically Atypical Countries'

The situation in the United States is further complicated by the fact that DHS officials don’t know where all of the more than 7.5 million migrants who’ve arrived since Biden took office are living. Those whom Border Patrol agents have encountered and processed have immigration court dates, but those dates are years in advance. Many people with uncertain immigration status lack health insurance and stay off the grid as much as possible, meaning even if the U.S. launched some kind of vaccination program it would not know where to concentrate its efforts.

In addition, the historic flood of illegal immigration during the Biden administration has also featured a much more global population. DHS uses the term “historically atypical countries” to describe the panoply of countries outside of Mexico and Central America from which illegal immigration has soared. Between 2011 and 2022, the number of annual encounters involving immigrants from historically atypical countries soared from fewer than 8,000 to almost 1 million. The first six months of 2023 saw more than half of official encounters – these numbers do not include what Border Patrol calls “gotaways” for whom little information is available – from historically atypical countries. But infectious diseases largely forgotten in the U.S. remain public health issues in both hemispheres, and many of those nations have much less robust vaccination programs than most modern Western nations.

Pierre Arents/Wikimedia

Ancient scourge: Leprosy victim, 24, in a medical monograph, circa 1886.

Pierre Arents/Wikimedia

In 1988, when the World Health Organization launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, wild poliovirus was evident in 125 countries, but the zone where it remains endemic has shrunk to Afghanistan and Pakistan, with most recent cases occurring along the countries’ nearly 1,600-mile border, according to the CDC. Vaccination campaigns have proved problematic under the militant Islamic fundamentalist Taliban, according to the CDC. Oral vaccines in “parts of the south and northeast regions” are “allowed only at health facilities, mosques, and polio vaccination sites.”

In March, Al Jazeera reported that the Taliban would allow a polio vaccination program for children, but precise figures on the country’s overall vaccination rate remain unclear. The World Health Organization estimates that 76% of Afghanistan’s children have received a polio vaccine.

But some countries have even lower vaccination rates. On Nov. 30, for instance, some 700 people, including many from Senegal and Nigeria, walked into the U.S. at the Texas border. Only 63% of Senegal’s children have been vaccinated for polio, and various fevers, hepatitis, and malaria are endemic there. Measles, which the U.S. declared eliminated here in 2000, are an issue, too. The WHO estimates 22 million children missed their first measles vaccine last year and more than half of them live in just 10 countries, all of which fall in the “historically atypical” immigration list.

X

Ashley St. Clair, conservative commentator: “All the pilots, airline staff, and passengers want to know is: what medical screenings are being done?”

X

Measles cases have risen in the U.S., from 13 individual cases in 2020 to 121 in 2022, according to the CDC. Recent outbreaks in Ohio and Illinois have all occurred among unvaccinated children, according to state health officials. The age and nationality of victims is not made public, but the measles vaccination rate is below 70% in many countries that have sent immigrants to the U.S. recently.

While few are publicly pushing the panic button, some public health officials worry that a creeping mistrust of vaccines in the wake of the pandemic may make more Americans vulnerable to dangerous and even deadly scourges. Syphilis, for example, has been on the rise for many years but rose sharply during the pandemic.

COVID-19 has drawn the lion’s share of attention from the public health bureaucracy since 2020, leading to shortfalls in other areas, some experts said.

“All of these diseases are more prevalent in part because of lockdown policies which diverted public health resources and attention worldwide away from its traditional priorities of controlling the spread of these deadly infectious conditions,” Dr. Bhattacharya said, referring to measles and other maladies.

And just as there is no cure for polio, there is no vaccine for some infectious diseases. Malaria, for example, the mosquito-borne fever that killed more workers than yellow fever did when the Panama Canal was built, remains endemic in tropical zones, and its path to rare outbreaks in the U.S. usually follows either a trip made abroad or someone moving here, according to health officials in Florida.

Department spokesman Jae Williams told RCI the exact sources of many infectious disease outbreaks in the Sunshine State remain unknown, but the huge increase in illegal immigrants could be a clue.

“It’s always a possibility, and our most recent malaria cases appeared to be a strain from Central America,” he said. In other words, the malaria could have been brought by a newcomer or picked up by someone who traveled there and returned.

Central Florida this summer saw leprosy return, although the exact source remains a mystery, Williams said. Information about the age, sex, and nationality of victims is not public, and most of those who contracted the infectious, skin-disfiguring disease were described only as “landscapers.” Various accounts have speculated armadillos are to blame, but armadillos are not newcomers to the region. The theory holds that somehow the leprosy bacteria, which generally requires prolonged contact and against which most humans have developed immunity over millennia, is in the dirt armadillos wallow in, and the cases that broke out among landscapers then would be linked to the animals they encounter.

But leprosy is not endemic in Florida. It is most common in parts of southeast Asia, equatorial Africa, and Brazil.

“The influx of people, sure it’s a problem and it’s always a possibility,” Williams said. “But we don’t really know.”

Nevertheless, the questions are being asked with more frequency. On Dec. 19, Ashley St. Clair, a conservative commentator, set off a firestorm on X, formerly Twitter, that her Delta flight from Phoenix to New York was filled with people who had recently been processed, released, and brought to the airport by Border Patrol.

“All the pilots, airline staff, and passengers want to know is: what medical screenings are being done?” she wrote.

Delta did not respond to questions from RCI about what knowledge it had been provided about its passengers.

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