ARE PERTUSSIS CASES THE CANARY IN THE COAL MINE?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS5
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JANUARY 7, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“ARE PERTUSSIS CASES THE CANARY IN THE COAL MINE?”

 

No major health crisis afflicts California today, but elections have consequences (as ex-President Barack Obama once said) and such a crisis now stands a good chance to become one of them.

 

That is one potential implication of the upswing in California cases of pertussis (aka whooping cough) over the last year. As of Dec. 1, 2024, cases of this dangerous and highly contagious ailment were up by a factor of six over 2023, rising from below 300 cases to 1,744.

 

A vaccine is the main thing preventing pertussis from becoming an epidemic. Both public and private schools require it before students can enroll. That’s because anyone encountering a person infected with the bacterial disease will be at significant risk.

 

It's especially dangerous for very young children; most deaths it causes come before age 1. 

 

The number of 2024 cases was not truly exceptional, as this disease appears to run in five-year cycles, with the last previous large California outbreak in 2019. But epidemics may ensue if schools’ vaccine requirements for this and other diseases long seen mostly in society’s rear view mirror should be loosened beyond today’s exemption for only children with proven medical problems in taking vaccines.

 

Yet, looser rules are what President-elect Trump’s nominee to head the national health system has pushed for decades.

 

The Children’s Health Defense group founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long advocated an end of school vaccination requirements because of solidly disproven claims that vaccines cause things like autism and bowel diseases. Kennedy has also claimed vaccines for Covid 19 do more harm than good. Meanwhile, establishment medicine calls the claims bunk, and has produced what it describes as convincing evidence that every claim Kennedy ever made about vaccines was false.

 

This never dims the fervor of anti-vaccine activists, one of whom in 2019 attacked and beat beat a California state senator who sponsored a bill toughening vaccination requirements. The perpetrator live-streamed his ambush.

 

Kennedy refused to condemn such violence. Now he is nominated as the next secretary of Health and Human Services. If confirmed, he will supervise both the Food and Drug Administration, which must approve all new vaccines before they can be used, and the Centers for Disease Control, which sets national standards for vaccine use.

 

Trump promised Kennedy his putative new job last August, shortly after Kennedy abandoned an independent presidential run that threatened Trump’s chances. Trump has said he has no problems with Kennedy trying to impose his anti-vaxx approach on the nation (and yes, despite all his past statements and writings, Kennedy persistently denies being an anti-vaxxer).

 

How could Kennedy affect public health? One example occurred in 2019, when he gave an anti-vaxx speech on the island of Samoa. Shortly after, the island saw a measles outbreak infecting more than 5,700 people and killing 83, including many children. 

 

The measles, mumps and rubella shot required for California schoolchildren at various intervals was a prime target in that speech and other Kennedy statements.

 

His seeming effect on Samoa makes clear that if Kennedy keeps up his prior rhetoric in his new job, there could be many deaths from previously defeated diseases. California is a longtime hotbed of Kennedy-inspired anti-vaxx activity, with thousands of children now held out of school because parents oppose state vaccine policies.

 

The latest pertussis outbreak seems most severe in Marin County, where 2024 saw 129 cases per 100,000 population. By contrast, Los Angeles County had just four cases per 100,000 population.

 

Those numbers are likely the result of Marin having long been a hotbed of anti-vaxx feeling.

 

The historical fact is that diseases like measles, mumps and polio all but disappeared once vaccines for them reached common use. Kennedy says he's fine with the polio vaccine, which eliminated a major childhood scourge. But he is using lawyer Aaron Simi to help vet future health officials. Simi in 2022 petitioned the FDA to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine and has sought to end distribution of 13 others. 

 

The bottom line: if Kennedy continues his anti-vaxx activity in his potential new office, we may look back on today’s relatively mild whooping cough outbreak as the proverbial canary in the coal mine, a harbinger of much worse things to come.

 

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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net