It seems as if nothing will change his mind. The current outbreak of measles in Texas and New Mexico — which now counts 250 cases and two deaths, one of a child and one of an adult — has been Kennedy’s first test in his new role. So far, he has confirmed the worst fears of his opponents. While he’s acknowledged that the measles vaccine does prevent transmission of the disease, he has not urged people to get it. Instead, he’s enthused about the effectiveness of Vitamin A and cod liver oil as treatments.

It just so happens that Vitamin A and cod liver oil is the measles treatment of choice of the so called “crunchy moms” who are widely credited with powering Kennedy’s ascent. The crunchy moms are reacting online to the measles outbreak with defiance. They generally believe that measles is no more serious than the chicken pox, and even that it’s beneficial to catch it. They refuse to be cowed by what they see as an agenda-driven media circus. “Measles outbreak headlines = paid advertising,” wrote influencer Braci Dutton on Instagram last month. “The real headline? Your immune system was designed to handle life. Fear is the real virus. Sunshine, movement, and real food are the cure.”

The crunchy moms’ fervor on such matters has turned them into a potent political force, one that forms a critical part of Donald Trump’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. They have managed to make the day-to-day business of motherhood — what their children are eating, what kind of medical care they receive, what products they use — a key political issue. And their Covid era-fueled suspicion of the medical and scientific establishment has become a defining tendency on the Right.

If you’re a mother on Instagram, it’s almost impossible to avoid this crunchy content. I became aware of the moms even before I had my son early last year. The algorithm, having picked up on the fact that I was pregnant, funneled them into my Instagram feed. They were having “wild pregnancies” with no prenatal care at all, and even “freebirthing” at home with no medical professionals present. When their babies arrived, their conflict with the medical system intensified. There would be no “pokes” or “cupcakes” — code for vaccines, used online to avoid social media filters. Checkups at the pediatrician were best avoided completely. Formula was full of dangerous chemicals, as was sunscreen, as was most processed food available in the supermarket; milk pasteurization was unnecessary, even harmful; homeschooling was a must. Every detail of home life and childrearing was a battleground, under threat by nefarious forces.

“The personal is political” was the slogan of Left-wing feminists in the Seventies, but today it has no better inheritor than the MAHA moms. In the last few decades, the Right has successfully claimed ownership of the politics of motherhood, and neatly merged them with the Covid era’s upswing in hostility to medicine and expertise. It has made space for a politics centered on motherhood as an identity and on the granular concerns of moms.

The Left, meanwhile, has taken the opposite approach, ignoring the deeply political nature of homemaking altogether. Vice President JD Vance’s remark equating Democrats with “childless cat ladies” may have been unfair, but it reflects a real sentiment that has provoked the rightward swing of the crunchy moms. On paper, during the last election, the Democrats were the pro-woman party, with a female candidate and pro-choice policy. But preoccupied by the girlboss ethos, they failed to include women whose focus is on their home and family. As a result, the kind of mothers who once may have gravitated to the “granola” Left have now completed a hard Right turn.

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This mass desertion wasn’t inevitable. The Left used to concern itself more with the domestic realm; take the Wages for Housework campaign, begun in the Seventies, which sought equal recognition for women’s work in the home. Then there was Alix Kates Shulman’s “Marriage Agreement” essay from 1970, which delineated the arrangement she and her husband made to split housework equally, and which included as its first principle: “We reject the notion that the work which brings in more money is the more valuable.” More recently, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s influential 2004 book, The Two-Income Trap, argued that the decline of stay-at-home motherhood had had a deleterious effect on American families. But the overall tendency of mainstream feminism today has been to portray homemaking and care work as a kind of prison — Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name” — and urge women to succeed in the workforce just as a man would. This tendency, culminating in the frenetic Lean In-style corporate feminism of the 2010s, is what the crunchy moms are reacting to.

The MAHA moms on social media often allude to their disillusionment with feminism. “I wish the ‘mainstream feminism’ would also include mothers in their advocacy instead of contributing to the anti motherhood/children culture — further promoting the undervaluing of women’s domestic labor & refusing to acknowledge that the well-being of our children lays the groundwork for the future of society,” read an Instagram video by user “radical.gardenn” earlier this year.

But if feminism is considered one dragon to slay, Big Pharma is another. Twenty years ago, the word “crunchy” evoked NPR-listening New England or West Coast liberals who shopped at health food stores and did yoga. Today, it calls to mind Right-wing homesteaders who eschew vaccines. In a typical crunchy mom reel last week, the account “empowered.mama.nest” wrote: “They lied about thalidomide. They lied about DDT. They lied about tobacco. They lied about asbestos. They lied about mercury. They lied about opioids. They lied about covid. They are lying about vaccines too. You know who doesn’t have the incentive to lie? Mothers.”

Covid and the authorities’ heavy-handed vaccine implementation has much to do with this shift, drawing the battle lines definitively between Left and Right on vaccines and driving any skeptics into the arms of the anti-vaccine movement. But a deep distrust of Big Pharma was simmering well before then — and, again, it was moms at the forefront. Kennedy has said that moms of autistic children who attributed their child’s condition to vaccines inspired his initial interest in the vaccine issue, which has formed the cornerstone of his career. His running mate in 2024, Nicole Shanahan, is a self-described “autism mom” who believes her daughter’s autism stems from vaccines.

These two issues intersect in the online aesthetics of this movement. Crunchy mom content ranges from the gauzy and tradwife-inflected — women in prairie dresses kneading sourdough — to the militant, often by the same accounts. One minute you’re looking at someone’s video about co-sleeping, and the next you’re watching a woman drinking out of a jug of raw milk and talking about chemtrails. The crunchy moms seem to have it all figured out; for every thorny parenting dilemma, they have an answer. It’s easy to see why so many women have sought refuge among them amid motherhood’s flurry of anxiety and decision-making.

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And so far, their tactics seem to be working. The Food and Drug Administration, the crunchy moms’ nemesis, lost hundreds of workers during the Elon Musk-led DOGE purge. The National Institutes of Health, also under Kennedy’s purview, announced it was cutting research grants related to vaccine hesitancy. The Centers for Disease Control, another organization in the Department of Health and Human Services, is reportedly going to perform a large-scale study investigating whether there is a link between vaccines and autism (a notion that has already been studied extensively and is not supported by evidence).

Victory goes to the crunchy moms, but they may find that it’s a pyrrhic one. They want nasty ingredients and dyes out of the food supply, they want clean water and soil, and they want sterner oversight of pharmaceuticals — but they support an administration that is dismantling the federal agencies that oversee these areas. And if they hope that the Trump administration will remain steadfast against big business to defend their children’s health, they may find themselves disappointed. Kennedy’s latest move was to endorse the fast-food burger and milkshakes chain Steak ‘n Shake because it has stopped using seed oils.

This could be the moment for liberals to somehow reach out to the crunchy moms, but so far they’ve shown no interest in speaking to them on their terms — or in general, addressing the large swathes of Americans who have lost trust in the medical establishment. These women are trying to protect their children, and they think they’re doing so — even those who don’t vaccinate for measles. As long as “trust the science” is the only answer to a worried mom who has questions about the vaccine schedule, those moms will gravitate towards the side that embraces them — whether it ultimately benefits them or not.

Vaccines are one of the marvels of modern science, allowing our species to overcome some of our oldest microscopic adversaries. The erosion of public support for childhood immunization is thus lamentable, not to mention dangerous. Yet public-health and government authorities looking for someone to blame for growing vaccine skepticism might wish to look in the mirror: Their Covid and gender excesses have done a great deal to sow distrust among parents.

In a much-discussed report on Monday, The New York Times insisted on making this a partisan issue, noting that the number of kids receiving vaccine exemptions rose in states that Donald Trump won in November’s election. But exemptions are up in some Kamala Harris states, too. As The Times conceded, “the story with noncompliance is more complex” than the partisan headline figures might suggest. “It rose in both blue and red states, although more in red states.”

In short: The partisan angle tells only part of the story, as does the proliferation of crank ideas on the online right (a phenomenon that predates the pandemic, though it went on hyperdrive in the wake of it). Authorities in red states might be making it easier to obtain the exemptions. Or it could be that the great migration of the Covid era has reshuffled people into regions that more closely match their opinion on the issue of vaccinations. Or some combination of these factors may be at work. The bottom line, though, is that these and other factors wouldn’t be as significantly in play but for the breakdown in trust between many families and health agencies. That trust will take a long time to rebuild — that is, if it even can be rebuilt.

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By Thomas Fazi

Start with the source of the decline data: The CDC is at the top of the list of agencies that destroyed trust. Rochelle Walensky took over as the agency’s director on the day President Biden was inaugurated. Biden had promised to reopen schools in the first 100 days of his presidency. As you might recall, this wasn’t seen as a particularly ambitious goal, since that timeline would put the reopening date in May, right around when schools would be closing for the summer anyway. Yet by February, even that meager plan was scrapped.

Text messages showed that Walensky cowered to Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, and changed school-opening guidelines based on the union boss’s demands. No science was involved in the decision: a special interest group was allowed to influence policy at the nation’s top health agency.

As if that alone weren’t egregious enough, Walensky’s also shotgunned her own credibility. There seemed to be a lot of simple guessing in her comments. In November 2021, Walensky said that masks are 80% effective in reducing Covid spread, a figure that appears to have been made up on the spot. If true, that would have meant masks were far more effective than vaccines in stopping infection, a claim the CDC would never have made.

It wasn’t just Walensky who bungled or politicized the Covid-19 response. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of America’s war on Covid, frequently and unaccountably reversed himself or simply lied to the American people. He admitted to misleading the public on the efficacy of masks because of mask shortages at the outset of the pandemic. But in a closed-door interview session in January 2024 before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Fauci admitted that he had pushed regulations such as the six-feet rule and masking without having any clear evidence that these prescriptions would be effective.

Both Walensky and Fauci pushed the Covid vaccine on children, even after it was clear that the jabs didn’t stop the spread. In October 2022, a CDC advisory committee voted unanimously to add the Covid vaccine and the corresponding boosters to the recommended immunization schedule for children as young as 6 months old. By then, it was clear that the shot didn’t prevent transmission, so the argument was it “reduces risk of serious outcome”. Of course, kids faced a minuscule risk of serious outcomes in the first place.

This was nearly a year after European countries had started limiting the Covid vaccine for kids as data about myocarditis revealed the risk presented to teenage boys. The CDC was aware, too, that boys were far more at risk than girls, which led to a curious choice in its presentation of data. As David Zweig reported for Wired: “In the advisory-committee meeting, a slide was presented that showed that within seven days following the second dose, males aged 12 to 17 had a rate of 62.75 myocarditis cases per million, whereas females had a rate of 8.68. Averaging the two rates yields 35.72 cases. Yet the rate for young males is more than seven times that of young females”. The CDC frequently lumped the two together.

It wasn’t just Covid where public trust in health agencies and “expert” organizations was shattered. There was also the gender question. The CDC recommended the vaccine to “pregnant people” and removed all references to “women” from its vaccine website. Last year, the CDC presented guidance on “chest-feeding” — that is to say, pretend breastfeeding by biological males using “medication to induce lactation.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics is just as guilty of becoming a political operation with a health-care name. During the pandemic, the AAP reversed its previous guidance on the importance of babies being able to read faces to fit in with the leftist push for masking. The organization also took advice from teachers’ unions and pushed for schools to remain closed. Today, the AAP is busying itself issuing political statements on the conflict in the Middle East.

Parents didn’t wake up one day and decide to stop vaccinating their children without reason. They no longer trust groups that have proved themselves untrustworthy. Parents are fed up with falsehoods that made them wonder what else they’ve been lied to about. Moms and dads have had a front row seat to the politicization of health policy over the last few years and have decided to opt out of taking any further guidance from these people until that trust can be restored.

When I speak to parents who no longer vaccinate their children, a common thread is that they just don’t believe what they are told anymore. These were normal people, following the rules, until abnormal policies were pushed on their families. Low trust in institutions is detrimental to societies. Maybe those institutions should work on fixing themselves so people will once again listen to what they have to say.

“Many diseases never reach herd immunity – including measles, malaria, AIDS and flu…” he said. “Herd immunity is a flawed goal – even if we could get to it, which we can’t.”

"The Great Barrington declaration is underpinned by two central claims, and both are emphatically false."

Health secretary Matt Hancock tells the House of Commons that "herd immunity is a flawed goal without a vaccine."@MattHancock | @HouseofCommons pic.twitter.com/znCZTOF9jX

— Talk (@TalkTV) October 13, 2020

Let’s have a look at the diseases he mentions. Measles, if it arrives on ‘virgin soil’, can devastate a population. In Tahiti and Moorea and the South-east and North-west Marquesas, between 20% and 70% of the population was lost to the first epidemic. Natural infection with measles provides lifelong immunity, and we now have a vaccine which provides similar solid, durable protection. We have not been able to eliminate the disease, but those who rather selfishly choose not to vaccinate their children are only able make that choice because the risks of infection are kept low by those who are immune — currently, a combination of those, like me, who caught it and recovered and many others for whom it is vaccine induced. The vaccine does not work in babies, which is why you have to wait till they are a year old before they get it. We can do this because herd immunity keeps the risk of infection down, so they are are unlikely to be infected in their first year of life. Without this herd protection, many under ones would die (as they regularly do in sub-Saharan Africa) despite a vaccine being available.

Malaria (a primary focus of my research) is caused by a parasite which carries at least 60 different outfits with which to disguise itself from immune attack. We, nonetheless, typically acquire sufficient immunity upon first infection so as not to suffer severe disease and death upon further attacks. This is a feature it probably has in common with Covid-19. But that is where the similarity ends. It has been difficult to make a malaria vaccine that covers all of its diversity, but fortunately that should not be a problem for Covid-19.

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By Saloni Dattani

AIDS is caused by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus which also has an extraordinary capacity to change outfits during the course of infection. This, and other mechanisms of subverting the immune response, allow it to persist indefinitely in an infected person. Even so, rates of infection will slow down as the virus runs out of people to infect.

Fortunately, Covid-19 does not possess such an array of immune evasion mechanisms that could seriously compromise any possibility of vaccine development in the next few years. Like HIV, influenza also has the ability to change its outfit, and periodically a new strain emerges requiring a new vaccine. It is because sufficient immunity accumulates in the population that a radical change of outfit becomes worthwhile. What Mr Hancock means when he says we do not reach herd immunity to flu is that it finds ways around it; it is unlikely, given the nature of coronaviruses that the SARS Cov-2 virus would be capable of doing the same thing.

In a nutshell, the development of immunity through natural infection is a common feature of many pathogens, and it is reasonable to assume that Covid-19 does not have any tricks up its sleeve to prevent this from happening — it would pose a very serious problem for the development of a vaccine if it did. Having said this, the Covid-19 virus belongs to a family of viruses which do not typically give you lifelong immunity against infection. Most of us will never have heard of these other four ‘seasonal’ coronaviruses that are currently circulating in our communities. And yet surveys indicate that at least 3% of the population is infected by any single one of these corona cousins during the winter months. These viruses can cause deaths in high risk groups or require them to receive ICU care or ventilator support, so it is not necessarily true that they are intrinsically milder than the novel Covid-19 virus. And like the Covid-19 virus, they are much less virulent in the healthy elderly and younger people than influenza.

One important reason why these corona cousins do not kill large numbers of people is because even though we lose immunity and can be reinfected, there is still always a decent enough proportion of immune people in the population to keep the risk of infection low to those who might die upon contracting it. Also, all the coronaviruses in circulation — including the Covid-19 virus— have some features in common which means that getting one coronavirus will probably offer some protection against other coronaviruses. This is becoming increasingly clear from work in many labs, including my lab in Oxford. It is against this background of immunity from itself and its close relations that Covid-19 virus has to operate.

So what does Mr Hancock mean by “reaching” herd immunity? Herd immunity is a continuous variable which increases as people become immune and decreases as they lose immunity or die. He is perhaps referring to the threshold of herd immunity at which the rate of new infections starts to decrease. We do not yet have a very clear idea of what this threshold is for Covid-19 as the landscape in which it spreads includes people who are susceptible to it, people who have built up immunity to it, and people who have immunity to other coronaviruses.

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Unfortunately, we do not have a good way of telling how many people have actually been exposed to the new virus, or how many people were resistant to start with. We are able to test for antibodies – and my lab in Oxford has been doing so since early April – but, as with other coronaviruses, Covid-19 antibody levels decline after recovery, and some people do not make them at all, and so antibody levels will not give us the answer. More and more evidence is accumulating that other arms of immunity, like T cells, play an important role.

Indications of the herd immunity threshold having been reached are available from the time signatures of epidemics in various parts of the world where death and infection curves tend to “bend” in the absence of intervention or to stay down when interventions were relaxed (in comparison with other locations where the opposite happened). But we do not know how far we are from it in most parts of the UK. It is important to bear in mind that the attainment of the herd immunity threshold does not lead to disease eradication. Instead it corresponds to an equilibrium state in which the infections lingers at low levels in the community. This is the situation we tolerate for most infectious diseases (like flu which kills 650K people every year globally). The situation can be vastly improved through vaccination, but it is very difficult to eliminate the disease even with a good vaccine.

We are of course also able to test for presence of the virus, and there is much attention on this with ‘test and trace’ strategies. However this test, known as the PCR test, is of limited value as it cannot tell us whether someone is infectious and can pass on the disease, whether they have the virus but cannot pass it on, or indeed whether the virus has been destroyed by the immune system and only fragments remain. This means that we need to make public health decisions based on only partial information, and in a changing environment, and is why assumptions of how many people have been infected and are immune are so important.

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The Great Barrington Declaration proposes a solution for how we may proceed in the face of such uncertainty. It suggests that we exploit the feature of this virus that it does not cause much harm to the large majority of the population to allow them to resume their normal lives, while shielding those who are vulnerable to severe disease and death.

Under these circumstances, immunity will build up in the general population to a level that poses a low enough risk of infection to the vulnerable population that they may resume their normal lives. All of this can happen over a period of six months, and so this Focused Protection plan does not involve the permanent segregation of the vulnerable from the rest of the population.

It is important that any new proposal should receive close scrutiny and constructive criticism. I’ve addressed the short duration of immunity; but another worry is the ‘occult damage‘, or secondary effects sustained by those who are not obviously vulnerable. It is not at all unexpected that some people would suffer post-viral symptoms for extended periods of time (I believe I did!) and that it may be quite debilitating for some. Among the lessons we could learn from this crisis could be a wider recognition of the frequency and intensity of post-viral syndromes and an investment in support (leave of absence from jobs, help with daily activities) of those unfortunate enough to suffer in this way. But it is not a new phenomenon and cannot be a good enough reason to stop the world and potentially let tens of millions of people starve to death.

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How such a plan may be put into place is obviously the next step to detail, and it is natural that some people might view with scepticism that it can be achieved other than in theory. Many components of protecting the vulnerable have already been enacted in the process of locking down so we should be discussing how these can be improved rather than dismissing them. Directing efforts at hospitals and care homes is one obvious priority. Other parts of the problem – such as the protection of vulnerable people within family settings – require careful discussion and thought, but it must always be borne in mind that these are temporary measures and in the long run could save more lives than cycling in and out of destructive lockdowns.

One colleague likened the GBD plan to “putting all your antiques in a room while your house is burning and fanning the flames”. A better analogy for the build up of herd immunity would rather be to douse the rest of the house with water (which could damage the Chippendale commode) — but it is hard to see how these could be the terms of a serious discussion.

Since the declaration last week, the Great Barrington Declaration has come under attack across the media, online (including Wikipedia and Google) from fellow academics as being part of a Libertarian conspiracy (my politics are not remotely libertarian) or being based in “pseudoscience”; others attempting to be less defamatory say that our views are “fringe”. The large number of serious scientists from top institutions taking part suggest otherwise. There are genuine good faith disagreements that must be aired and discussed — the impact on the world is too significant for us to fail to have this discussion in a serious way.