For the first time since 2018, a child in Kentucky has died of whooping cough. Not one, but two.
“Neither the infants nor their mothers had received the recommended immunizations against pertussis during pregnancy or infancy,” read the statement released by Kentucky’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services on June 6.
One would hope that these unnecessary deaths would persuade anti-vaxx parents to vaccinate their children; however, that is the triumph of hope over experience.
Earlier this year, two children died unnecessarily of measles in Texas. Another died soon after. As of June 5, 1,168 confirmed measles cases had been recorded this year in the United States, including in Kentucky. The year isn’t even half over! (Compare this with 55 cases in all of 2012.)
“This is unbelievably tragic — and entirely preventable,” wrote epidemiologist Dr. Katelyn Jetelina in April. “… This is the third death in just three months — something we haven’t seen in the U.S. in decades.
“Since measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, we’ve seen outbreaks — most notably in California (starting in Disneyland) and in New York among the Hasidic Jewish community. But even in those large outbreaks, we did not see multiple deaths like this.”
Before these three deaths, there were only three deaths total from 2000 to 2024: two were immunocompromised and the third was a 75-year-old with pneumonia. All three of this year’s victims were otherwise healthy children.
“Children are dying from a disease we already eliminated,” Jelina wrote. “We know how to stop it — vaccinations. But this outbreak is not slowing down as it’s fueled by falsehoods and mistrust and compounded by a lack of strong leadership.”
How brazen is the misinformation campaign? The Mennonite parents of the first child to die of measles remain certain that it wasn’t measles that killed their 6-year-old daughter. Where would they get such a ridiculous idea that flies in the face of medicine and science? Hint: He’s in the Trump Cabinet as the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Yes, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. founded the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) in 2007. The nonprofit doesn’t really defend children’s health, but it does do yeoman’s work in defending countless crackpot medical conspiracy theories. That organization was the one interviewing these parents and reenforcing their misinformation message that vaccines are much more dangerous than preventable children’s diseases. The CHD “built a fake CDC website pushing false claims about the MMR vaccine and autism. They’ve deployed ‘crisis teams.’ They’ve shown up at the same places as the CDC response team in order to contradict the medical experts and sow confusion,” Jelina revealed.
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Sadly, this measles mayhem is probably a predictor of how it will go with whooping cough. 2024 saw 543 cases of whooping cough in Kentucky, the highest level since 2012. By February 2025, the United States had seen the most whooping cough deaths since 2017: at least a dozen.
Before vaccines were introduced in the 1940s, 9,000 Americans a year died of whooping cough (official name: pertussis). A vaccine called the DTaP (which immunizes against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis) every 10 years could prevent this spread.
“It’s important that people understand that immunity wanes, even if you are vaccinated as a child,” Dr. Marcos Mestre, chief clinical operations officer at Nicklaus Children’s Health System in Miami, told CBS News. “And if you are going to be around infants, we recommend vaccination every 10 years.”
But I fear — despite the copious evidence otherwise — that grieving parents will insist even beyond the moment of their child’s death that vaccines, not deadly diseases, are the real enemy.
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