The disease was eliminated across the Americas in 2024, but urgent vaccination drives are now under way as cases rise from Mexico to Bolivia after outbreaks farther north

The disease was eliminated across the Americas in 2024, but urgent vaccination drives are now under way as cases rise from Mexico to Bolivia after outbreaks farther north

Governments across Latin America are stepping up efforts to vaccinate their populations against measles, as outbreaks in North America drive a 34-fold increase in the number of cases reported in the region this year.

Measles cases have surged worldwide to a 25-year high, due to low vaccine coverage and the spread of misinformation about vaccine safety. However, there is added concern in parts of Latin America over unequal access to healthcare and the worrying situation in the US, which is facing its worst measles outbreak in decades following a reversal of vaccine policy led by Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.

“The US’s political position in relation to health and vaccination is an outrage,” said Rosana Richtmann, an infectious disease doctor and coordinator of the Brazilian Society of Infectious Disease’s immunisation committee. “It’s a problem for us.”

    • floofloof@lemmy.ca
      33·
      21 hours ago

      The COVID vaccine wasn’t bungled though. It was a remarkably speedy and successful use of mRNA technology, and a great proof of how effective that approach to vaccines can be. If anything was bungled about it, it was leaving it in the sole possession of for-profit drug companies so that rich countries would have better access to it.

      What bungling did you have in mind?

      • radiofreebc@lemmy.world
        18·
        21 hours ago

        I got vaccinated. I just feel like this was a perfect way to get a lot of difficult people out of the way.

        • triptrapper@lemmy.zip
          10·
          20 hours ago

          Difficult to whom? Which administration? Most anti-vaxxers (I assume) are Trump supporters. They might self-identify as free thinkers, but they’ve pledged allegiance to anything right-leaning, so why would the far-right government want to get rid of them?

          • MrSmiley@lemmy.zip
            3·
            17 hours ago

            It’s not because they are Trump supporters that make them anti-vaxxers. The stronger correlation is magical thinking.

            Still some small effects of ideology, but they pale in comparison to effects of magical thinking. If you run all of this in a regression equation with the standard demographic controls, the effects of ideology basically disappear once you take magical thinking into account.

            https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/02/03/anti-vax-attitudes-and-political-ideology/

            As for the why would a far right government cull their own supporters? Look at it more of a top-down dominance hierarchy, where the ones at top are accelerationists with malthusian tendencies. They have a utopian vision of the future where they run little technofiefdoms. The people within their borders, their “subjects” are slaves, property to be used and discarded as they please. Those deemed useless ground into biofuel.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

            Civilization, as a process, is indistinguishable from diminishing time-preference (or declining concern for the present in comparison to the future). Democracy, which both in theory and evident historical fact accentuates time-preference to the point of convulsive feeding-frenzy, is thus as close to a precise negation of civilization as anything could be, short of instantaneous social collapse into murderous barbarism or zombie apocalypse (which it eventually leads to). As the democratic virus burns through society, painstakingly accumulated habits and attitudes of forward-thinking, prudential, human and industrial investment, are replaced by a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a ‘reality television’ political circus. Tomorrow might belong to the other team, so it’s best to eat it all now.

            https://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/

            Anti-vaxxers could be viewed more as a means to achieving apocalyptic goals. The power behind Trump doesn’t care what the anti-vaxxers support, only care about their use-value. The same with Trump, he’s a means to an end, as useful idiot, to dismantle democracy and serve as scapegoat.