samoa guam
RFK2 MEASLES FAIL
{MMA 8 24}:
Fox News is championing RFK Jr's view of public health, even as it puts your kids at risk
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 08/27/24
Fox News hosts like Ainsley Earhardt are overjoyed about notorious anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s purported ability to help former President Donald Trump’s campaign appeal to “moms” concerned with public health.
“I think moms around the country appreciate his stance for trying to make our children healthy again,” she said on Monday.
Earhardt noted that in Kennedy’s speech last week endorsing Trump, “he talked about how 75% of the budget from the FDA comes from pharmaceutical companies” and “said it's very profitable when a child is sick,” adding that Kennedy’s condemnation of “corruption in health care” is “music to every mom’s ears."
The culture warriors at Fox aren’t typically invested in talking about public health issues. But in one key health-related fight on which the network aligned with Kennedy — COVID-19 vaccines — the results have proved disastrous. Their combined assault on what Kennedy falsely termed “the deadliest vaccine ever made” helped trigger plummeting levels of support for childhood vaccinations among Republicans, with ongoing consequences for America’s kids.
Fox’s unique pull with its right-wing audience gave it a moral responsibility to encourage viewers to take the life-saving COVID-19 vaccines. Instead, the network — led by stars like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity — pandered to anti-vaxxers like Kennedy.
Fox conducted a yearslong campaign to undermine the vaccines, which the network falsely portrayed as ineffective and dangerous, while talking up the potential of fake cures for the virus. Its hosts were particularly scathing about public health efforts to require vaccination at schools and workplaces, which Ingraham described as a “crime against humanity.”
The right-wing assault on the COVID-19 vaccines led to lower rates of vaccinations among Republicans — and consequently higher death rates. But the anti-vaccine sentiment unleashed by the likes of Fox and Kennedy was not limited to COVID-19: There have been broader impacts on GOP support for the full range of childhood vaccinations.
Gallup reported earlier this month that the percentage of Americans who say it is important for parents to get their children vaccinated has tumbled since the COVID-19 pandemic — and that Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are responsible for that decline.
Nearly 20% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents now say that it’s “not very important” or “not important at all” for parents to get their kids vaccinated, according to Gallup’s polling.
Gallup further found that the percentage of Americans who think the government should require parents to vaccinate their children against deadly contagions like the measles has fallen to 51%, down from 62% in 2019 and 81% in 1991. That decline is largely due to Republicans, 60% of whom now oppose such government mandates.
The result is a looming crisis for America's children. It takes a 95% vaccination rate to achieve herd immunity for measles, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But immunization among kindergartners has fallen from 95% before the pandemic to 93% in the most recent school year. In 18 states, more than 4% of kindergartners have vaccine exemptions.
:{:{
}:
The result is skyrocketing outbreaks of preventable and dangerous diseases among children — but things can still get so much worse.
Trump is more than willing to prioritize his political future over your kids. Playing to his base, he all but disavowed the COVID-19 vaccines his administration helped bring to fruition, and he vows that his administration “will not give one penny” to schools that require their students to be vaccinated.
He sought Kennedy’s endorsement and is dangling the prospect of rewarding him with a plum post — potentially secretary of Health and Human Services, where the anti-vaccine activist would wield incredible power. Far from trying to hold him back, Fox hosts like Earhardt and MAGA princes like Charlie Kirk are celebrating Kennedy’s supposed health bona fides.
For a glimpse of what an empowered Kennedy might mean for America’s parents, it's worth reviewing his role in “one of the worst measles outbreaks in recent memory,” as FactCheck.org put it:
In 2018, two infants in American Samoa died when nurses accidentally prepared the combined measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine with expired muscle relaxant rather than water. The Samoan government temporarily suspended the vaccination program, and anti-vaccine advocates — including Kennedy and his nonprofit — flooded the area with misinformation. The vaccination rate dropped to a dangerously low level. The next year, when a traveler brought measles to the islands, the disease tore through the population, sickening more than 5,700 people and killing 83, most of them young children.
That doesn’t sound like “music to every mom’s ears."
---
https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/saudis-and-the-us-team-up-to-kill-european-union-effort-to-create-a-dirty-money-blacklist/
United States and key ally Saudi Arabia saw their lobbying efforts pay off on Friday after the European Commission’s proposed dirty money blacklist—which included the oil-rich kingdom and several American territories—fizzled.
“The Americans fell on us like a tonne of bricks,” an anonymous Brussels official told the *Financial Times*.
The effort “to protect the integrity of the E.U. financial system,” the commission said last month, included blacklisting 23 territories that had “strategic deficiencies in their anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing frameworks.” They included American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico as well as Saudi Arabia.
However, as the Wall Street Journal reported Friday, “European governments, under pressure from Washington and Riyadh, have refused to endorse” the list.
“The rejection of the governments is a farce at the expense of security,” declared Sven Giegold, Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from Germany, in a statement quoted by *Bloomberg*. “France and the U.K. want to remove Saudi Arabia and other countries from the list. Spain is protecting Panama. The United States is exerting massive pressure because four U.S. jurisdictions,” he said.
“Governments must ask themselves whether they are on the side of autocrats or their citizens!” he added in a tweet.
As Politico reported, the list, which would need the backing of the European Parliament and Council of the E.U. to go into effect, “is politically sensitive because it has teeth. E.U. banks that handle payments connected to the blacklisted countries and territories would have to conduct ‘enhanced due diligence’ on any cash that moves to and from the E.U. and the blacklisted jurisdictions.”
Politico also noted the “intense backlash and behind-the-scenes lobbying from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.”
The proposal drew ire from the U.S. Treasury Department, which denounced the commission’s methodology, and its head, Secretary Steven Mnuchin, wrote to the commission to denounce the effort, as FT reported.
U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, even acknowledged that “we had to spend our energy killing this bad idea.”Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, for his part, also wrote to E.U. leaders about the “surprising and unexpected” list, and warned of its damage to “trade and investment flows between the kingdom and the European Union.”
==