Never let a (fake) public health crisis go to waste

The New York Times takes 2025's measles hysteria past 10, all the way to 11. And the fact it published falsehoods to do so doesn't seem to bother it.

Sometimes you can’t let the science get in the way of The Science (TM).

Or the truth get in the way of a good woke-shaming exercise.

To ensure diverse opinions, The New York Times offers many types of insufferable lefty columnists, including feminist, environmentalist, literaryish, and Southern. The categories are not exclusive. If readers are really lucky, a writer can be all four at once!

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Margaret Renkl. She usually offers readers tales of daisies blooming with a side of Trump hate. They’re as scintillating as you imagine.

Renkl is 63. Renkl just got a measles vaccine. I know this because — as her contribution to the media hysteria over a measles “epidemic” that is actually part of a predictable once-every-five-years cycle — she described getting jabbed in a piece called, Why I Got the Measles Vaccine at Age 63.

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(Reading The Times so you don’t have to. That’s gotta be worth 20 cents a day!)

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Why indeed? Especially since Renkl acknowledges she was in fact vaccinated against measles as a kid. Honest answers would include:

1: I was looking for something to write about and I figured my odds of Guillain-Barre syndrome were low.

2: I needed to virtue signal and I was afraid to vandalize a Tesla, so many cameras, ugh.

3: I’m weirdly scared of measles, and all these articles have triggered me.

Now any of those columns would have been funny and interesting. So, no.

Instead Renkl offered a tortured justification about how her childhood vaccination might not protect her from measles, though she didn’t bother to check if she still had antibodies before getting the shot. That would have been too much trouble (and might have killed the column).

No, Renkl mainly wanted us to know: she’s a good person. A very good person. Better than anyone who voted for Donald Trump, for sure.

My own safety wasn’t my chief concern. Doing everything I can to protect my fellow human beings who cannot be vaccinated… seems to me to be the only moral thing to do for anyone living in close community with other people. And that’s almost all of us.

Community is a concept that the MAGA movement is working overtime to undo…

Yes, getting a measles shot - even if you may already have antibodies against measles, even if you are not at any meaningful risk of getting measles - is THE ONLY MORAL THING TO DO, PEOPLE.

And here I thought it was a pointless waste of medical resources.

I am obviously not a moral person. I apologize. Please excuse me while I find a dog to kick.

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(More proof I’m not a moral person. I am kinda funny sometimes, though.)

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All of this would be typical Times wokeness, except that early in the column Renkl and her editors showed us just how much they care about facts. In her second paragraph, she wrote that when her first child was born in 1992:

There was no reason for his pediatrician to warn me that I needed to keep him away from anyone who wasn’t vaccinated against other deadly infectious diseases. Before the internet deluded people into believing that an online search was commensurate with a medical degree, vaccination rates were high enough in this country to provide de facto herd immunity.

What Renkl wrote wasn’t just wrong or mistaken. It was the opposite of the truth.

For months, legacy media outlets have tried to fan hysteria around a new American measles “epidemic.” In reality, this year’s increase is predictable. Even “Your Local Epidemiologist,” a woke Substacker, acknowledged this a week ago, explaining that “Measles cases surge every five years for reasons we don’t fully understand.”¹

Nor have American childhood vaccination rates changed much for decades. They rose a bit during the 2010s, and have fallen a bit since 2020. Given how much public health experts lied about lockdowns, masks, and the mRNA Covid shots, the surprise isn’t that rates are down — it’s that they’re not down more.²

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(You can’t handle the truth! Well, you can. Renkl can’t.)

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The big falsehood in the paragraph, though, is one Renkl may not even know is a lie.

The worst measles epidemic in the last 40 years took place in, wait for it, 1989 and 1990, when over 45,000 Americans were infected — almost 200 times as many as have been infected so far this year. A number of children died, too.

The outbreak received modest media attention, though nothing like the hysteria that Renkl and the gang have piled on this winter. The reason may have had something to do with the fact that the outbreak was centered in poor black and Hispanic communities in New York City — groups that reporters did not view as appropriate targets for vaccination shaming campaigns (unlike Mennonites or Orthodox Jews).

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The epidemic lasted through 1991, when almost 10,000 Americans got measles. Even in 1992, the number was 2,200 — more than the last five years combined.

So, yeah, Renkl doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

But when has that ever stopped a woke public health scold before?

The more interesting question: Why didn’t Renkl’s pediatrician mention measles 33 years back? (Assuming any part of that conversation happened.) And the answer is that the doctor probably viewed the risk as no big deal — a minor threat to be avoided through vaccination if possible, but not hardly worth upsetting a new parent over.

My, how times have changed.

Expect the Times and Renkl to correct their mistakes and return to reality on the 12th of Never.

1. The two previous spikes were in 2014 and 2019; the Covid lockdowns pushed the cycle back a year.

2. As most of you know, I think the measles vaccine offers a good risk-benefit ratio and my own kids have now received all the standard shots. But I understand why so many Unreported Truths readers are suspicious of ALL public-health advice at this point.