Washington Spent the Money.

TheWashington Posteditorial board has apparently recently discovered that Social Security and Medicare are in trouble, and they are shocked, shocked, I tell you!That part is true, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. This is a fact that anyone not living under a rock has known for a very long time. According to the 2026 Social Security Trustees Report, the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund is projected to exhaust its reserves in late 2032. At that point, incoming revenue would cover only about 78 percent of scheduled benefits. Medicare’s Hospital Insurance Trust Fund is projected to exhaust its reserves in 2033. These are serious problems that have been developing for decades, and Congress has known about them for decades. As have the we the American people.But in a remarkably biased editorial titled “To get the national debt under control, start with the retirement state,” the entireWashington Posteditorial board manages to take a story about decades of federal fiscal irresponsibility, demographic change and the extraordinary cost of American medicine and turn it into a story about seniors having too much money.The underlying fiscal problem is real. The editorial analysis of how we got here, and particularly who should now be made to pay for it, is considerably less impressive.The Money Wasn’t “Not Saved”The first bit of editorial sleight of hand comes almost immediately. The Post explains that for many years Social Security collected more in payroll taxes than it paid in benefits. Then it tells readers that “the government didn’t save that extra money.” Instead, Social Security bought Treasury bonds and the government spent the money.That formulation is technically clever and editorially sloppy. The Social Security surplus did not simply disappear. By law, the trust funds invested their reserves in interest-bearing obligations of the United States Treasury. The Treasury then borrowed and spent that money. Those are two different transactions, and collapsing them into the phrase “the government didn’t save it” obscures the most important part of the story.If I purchase a Treasury bond, the Treasury will spend the money I lent it. That does not mean my Treasury security somehow ceases to exist. It means the United States government owes me money. The same principle applies to Social Security. For decades, American workers paid Social Security taxes in excess of the benefits being paid to retirees. The federal government borrowed those surpluses, issued Treasury obligations to the trust funds, and spent the borrowed money elsewhere. Now Social Security needs those securities redeemed, which means Treasury has to obtain the money through taxes, spending reductions, or additional borrowing.That is a genuine federal fiscal problem. But it is not the same thing as saying the money was never saved, nor does it somehow make the Treasury securities held by Social Security imaginary assets.In fact, the accurate description is more damning. Washington borrowed decades of Social Security surpluses to help finance the rest of government. Now that Social Security needs the money back, the sages of the Washington Post editorial board tell us the problem is the “retirement state.”Medicare Benefits Are Not a Christmas PresentThe Post then informs us that a married couple earning around $100,000 and turning 65 in 2025 can expect to receive Medicare benefits worth 4.4 times what they paid in Medicare payroll taxes. It is an effective statistic because it makes Medicare sound like an extraordinarily generous gift bestowed upon retirees at the expense of everyone else. Except Medicare was never designed as an individual retirement savings account, something the Post itself acknowledges, and there is another rather important problem with this comparison (beyond the overt incitement of inter-generational conflict).The “value” of those Medicare benefits is largely a measure of what Medicare pays for American medical care. If a hospital charges Medicare $30,000 for a procedure, the elderly patient did not suddenly become $30,000 richer. The American medical system charged $30,000. Those are not remotely the same thing. Yet the Post uses the enormous cost of Medicare benefits as evidence of Medicare's generosity to its recipients, without spending nearly enough time asking why the underlying medical care costs so much in the first place.That omission matters because the United States has one of the most expensive health-care systems in the world. Drug prices, hospital consolidation, administrative overhead, specialty drugs, provider monopolies, site-of-service pricing and the increasingly complicated Medicare Advantage system all contribute to what taxpayers ultimately spend. Medicare Advantage payments for Parts A and B alone reached roughly $534 billion in 2025, and serious policy organizations across the political spectrum have raised concerns about overpayments associated with coding practices and other features of the program.There are obvious places to start reining in Medicare costs before asking seniors to pay more: attack fraud and improper payments, audit Medicare Advantage plans more aggressively, reduce administrative waste, move care to lower-cost settings when medically appropriate, and force down inflated drug prices. Dr. Mehmet Oz is already pursuing several of these at CMS, including auditing every eligible Medicare Advantage contract, tightening fraud enforcement, reforming payment for outpatient care and continuing Medicare drug-price negotiations. CMS reports that its program-integrity efforts produced $41.9 billion in savings in fiscal 2025 alone.Before deciding that Grandma is receiving too much Medicare, perhaps we should first ask whether taxpayers are paying rational prices for Grandma’s medical care. Those are very different questions. The Post focuses heavily on how much Medicare spends on beneficiaries while giving remarkably little attention to why the underlying medical care has become so expensive.Apparently, the Problem Is GrandmaThis is where the editorial’s underlying philosophy becomes much clearer. The Post argues that “a big chunk of Social Security benefits goes to people who don’t need them,” pointing out that more than one-third of benefits supposedly go to seniors with incomes above $100,000.Notice what has happened to the language. These are no longer Americans who spent 40 or 50 years paying Social Security taxes. They are now people who “don’t need” the money from the fund that they have paid into. The fact that they paid into the system throughout their working lives becomes secondary to the editorial board’s judgment about how much money they should be allowed to have in retirement.  Yet more incitement of inter-generational conflict.This would fundamentally change what Social Security is. Social Security has historically functioned as social insurance. You work, you pay into the system, your employer pays into the system, and your eventual benefit is calculated according to a statutory formula based upon your earnings history. The benefit formula is already progressive, but Social Security is deliberately not structured as an ordinary welfare program.The Post wants to move toward something quite different: a means-tested benefit for poorer retirees combined with compulsory private savings for everybody else. It explicitly praises versions of that model used elsewhere. That is a perfectly legitimate policy position, but it should be described honestly. This is not merely “saving Social Security.”Their plan would transform Social Security from an earned retirement benefit, financed by mandatory contributions over a lifetime of work and provided with the expectation that those contributions would produce benefits at retirement, into something much closer to a means-tested welfare program. That is not a minor adjustment. It changes the basic bargain under which Americans have paid Social Security taxes for generations.The editorial also barely considers an incentive problem. Imagine two people who earn approximately the same amount over their working lives. One spends almost everything. The other saves diligently, contributes to retirement accounts, pays off a home, invests carefully, and perhaps builds a small business. Both paid Social Security taxes for 40 years. When they retire, Washington looks at the second person and says that because she behaved responsibly and accumulated substantial assets, she no longer “needs” the Social Security benefit she paid into.We have now created a penalty for thrift. The irony is that the Post itself celebrates the enormous growth in private retirement savings as evidence that America has changed since Social Security was created. Americans responded to decades of government encouragement to save for retirement, accumulated wealth, and now that accumulated wealth becomes the justification for reducing the benefits they spent their working lives financing. That is quite a trick, but the Washington Post editorial board seems to have no self-awareness of their sleight of hand.Then Comes Medicare RationingThe Medicare proposal is even more revealing. The Post recommends limiting the addition of new services to Medicare because much of future spending growth will come from coverage of new treatments. It presents this as politically attractive because existing services would not have to be reduced. That language is wonderfully antiseptic, but what it describes is rationing.Today’s senior keeps today’s cancer treatment. Tomorrow’s senior may not receive tomorrow’s cancer treatment because Medicare decides it is too expensive to cover.  This is the chronic problem that pervades socialized medicine programs throughout the world.  Just ask seniors north of the border in the people’s republic of Canada. The Canadian government’s response to this problem appears to be their medical assistance in dying legislation (MAID). Perhaps some form of rigorous cost-effectiveness analysis really is necessary. No health-care system has unlimited resources, and there is a legitimate debate about whether every new drug or technology that produces a marginal benefit should automatically be purchased by taxpayers at whatever price a manufacturer demands.But the editorial board should at least have the courage to describe the policy accurately. “Limiting the addition of new services” sounds considerably nicer than telling Americans that Medicare may decline to cover future medical innovations because the government cannot afford them. The distinction is especially important when some of the fastest-growing areas of Medicare spending involve precisely these new drugs, biologics and specialty treatments.Having softened the language around restricting future care, the editorial arrives at its other preferred solution: “average seniors should be paying more than they currently pay.” There it is. The federal government has an enormous Medicare financing problem, and after remarkably little examination of why American medicine costs what it does, the Post concludes that ordinary retirees should reach further into their pockets.Well, that certainly benefits the medical-industrial complex.Seniors should pay for Congress's folly!What is most striking about the editorial is how quickly retirees become the obvious place to look for money. Where is the serious discussion of hospital consolidation and monopoly pricing? Where are the drug costs, administrative expenses, Medicare Advantage overpayments, aggressive coding practices, fraud and improper payments? Where is the serious examination of why the United States manages to spend so much more on health care than other developed countries?The Social Security discussion is similarly narrow. Legitimate arguments can be made about changes to the taxable wage base, payroll taxes, retirement ages, benefit formulas, labor force participation, economic growth, productivity, and immigration. None of these offers a painless solution, and that is precisely the point. A serious examination of Social Security insolvency should force readers to confront the costs and tradeoffs of the major alternatives.Instead, the Post offers a remarkably convenient progression. Social Security and Medicare face insolvency. Seniors have accumulated substantial wealth. Therefore, seniors should receive less Social Security and pay more for Medicare. That is not an actuarial conclusion forced upon us by mathematics. It is a policy preference about who should bear the burden, presented as though it naturally follows from the fiscal numbers.The “Retirement State”Perhaps the most revealing phrase appears in the headline itself. The Post calls Social Security and Medicare the “retirement state.” Not the federal spending problem. Not the entitlement-financing problem. Not the health-care cost problem. The retirement state.By the end of the article, America’s elderly have become “the nation’s wealthiest generation,” possessing “significant wealth to draw on.” That framing subtly changes the nature of the debate. Someone will have to take the fall, so let's make retirees the source of this evil.  A structural problem created by demographics, medical inflation, congressional promises, decades of federal borrowing, and the unwillingness of successive administrations to confront politically difficult choices becomes an intergenerational distribution problem. Older Americans have accumulated too much. Therefore, government should give them less and charge them more.There is also a larger ideological pattern here that the Post does not disclose. This is hardly the first time its opinion pages have portrayed older Americans as having accumulated too much wealth at the expense of the young. Just last week, the Post published an essay titled“Shift the safety net toward the young,”explicitly arguing that government redistributes too much from young people to old people. In July came“No more regressive subsidies for seniors,”which described Americans between 65 and 74 as the wealthiest age group and argued against giving them additional tax protection. In March, another Post opinion called for limiting Social Security benefits for affluent retirees, and last year its opinion pages complained that federal policy was favoring older Americans while neglecting younger generations.What all of this really reveals is a strong, consistent ageist bias at the Washington Post editorial board, beneath which resides a familiar subtext.  From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.  The hidden subtext is a fundamental tenet of Marxist philosophy.There is something deeply strange about this emerging redistributionist argument. Much of the wealth held by older Americans exists precisely because they worked, saved, invested, bought homes and contributed to retirement accounts for forty or fifty years. Of course a 70-year-old normally has more accumulated wealth than a 30-year-old. That is how a lifetime of saving is supposed to work. Yet the Post increasingly treats the successful accumulation of retirement wealth almost as evidence of unfairness, and then uses that wealth to justify reducing the benefits those same people spent their working lives paying for. This is redistribution by generation rather than simply by income, with responsible saving eventually becoming the justification for taking more from those who saved. The Post is entitled to advocate that philosophy. It should at least acknowledge what it is doing, but perhaps that is asking too much from this “progressive” narrative-enforcement engine, long characterized as “Pravda on the Potomac”.Social Security and Medicare absolutely need reform. Pretending otherwise is irresponsible. The 2026 Trustees put Social Security’s combined 75-year actuarial deficit at 4.42 percent of taxable payroll, and the dates at which the trust funds encounter serious financing problems are no longer safely buried in some distant future. Something will have to change, and pretending there is a painless solution is no more responsible than pretending there is no problem.But there is an enormous difference between acknowledging that reality and quietly deciding who should pay for it. The federal government spent decades borrowing Social Security surpluses. Congress ran enormous deficits under both parties. Washington tolerated, subsidized, and helped construct one of the most expensive medical systems in the world. Politicians repeatedly refused to confront Social Security and Medicare financing because doing so was politically unpleasant.Now the bill has arrived, and theWashington Posteditorial board has identified the problem.Apparently, America’s retirees just have too much money, and what is needed is a good dose of intergenerational wealth redistribution, ideally coupled to struggle sessions for the guilty elders.  Now, please remind me, where have we seen this movie before?  When the Washington Post editorial board clearly demonstrates their political philosophical bias, you should believe them.  By their actions, you will know them.JGM/RWMIf you value independent analysis that is willing to question the assumptions behind the headlines, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Research like this takes time. It means reading the original documents, checking the numbers, following the money, and asking the questions that too often disappear when an editorial position is presented as objective analysis.Subscribe nowWe do not have a corporate media company behind us, and we do not want one. This publication is supported by its readers, which means paid subscriptions allow us to remain independent and continue doing this work without answering to advertisers, political parties, pharmaceutical companies, or institutional gatekeepers. If you are already a paid subscriber, thank you. If you are not, and you find this work valuable, please consider joining us. Your support makes it possible.And of course, we always appreciate when people share, crosspost, or even republish our work on your own site (creative commons license - meaning please put in a link to the original article and acknowledge the authors).Share

Summary: Apparently, the Problem Is Grandma


First Came the Measles Deaths. The Causes Can Come Later.

Pennsylvania announced this week what it called the first two “measles-associated deaths” in the Commonwealth in 35 years. Within hours, those carefully chosen words were disappearing. NBC News told readers that two unvaccinated people had “die[d] of measles.” Other news organizations similarly reported that people had died “from” or “of” measles. Governor Josh Shapiro quickly turned the deaths into an attack on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., accusing Kennedy and the Trump administration of spreading misinformation with “real-life consequences.” There was just one rather important problem with this extraordinarily convenient narrative:Pennsylvania itself had not established that either person died from measles.That is not my interpretation of some obscure epidemiological distinction. It comes directly from the Pennsylvania Department of Health. Department press secretary Neil Ruhland explained that the state uses the term “measles-associated” when laboratory or epidemiological evidence of measles is present, but the official cause of death remains under investigation. In other words, at the time Pennsylvania announced two historic measles-associated deaths,the official causes of those deaths had apparently not yet been determined.That changes this story considerably. Measles can kill. It can cause pneumonia, encephalitis, and other serious complications, particularly among vulnerable people. There is nothing controversial about acknowledging that. But that is entirely different from announcing two deaths whose causes remain under investigation and watching “measles-associated” rapidly become “died of measles” in the national press. The former is a provisional public-health classification. The latter is a causal assertion. Somewhere between the Pennsylvania Department of Health and the headlines delivered to millions of Americans, that distinction largely disappeared.Pennsylvania could resolve much of the confusion by releasing a modest amount of anonymized clinical information. Instead, the Department has declined to provide the ages of the deceased, their places of death, relevant medical histories, comorbidities, clinical courses, or the complications that supposedly connect measles to their deaths. Governor Shapiro and Health Secretary Debra Bogen would not even say whether either person was an infant (or elderly), whether either was pregnant, or whether they belonged to one of Lancaster County’s Plain communities. None of that requires publishing names or addresses. Age ranges, relevant comorbidities and causes of death are routinely reported without identifying individual patients.There is also something rather selective about Pennsylvania’s newfound devotion to medical privacy. The Department says it cannot tell us the ages or medical backgrounds of the dead because doing so might identify them. Yet it had no apparent difficulty releasing one particular piece of private medical information:both were unvaccinated.Lancaster County Commissioner Josh Parsons noticed the same contradiction. Vaccination status is medical information too. By remarkable coincidence, it was also the one piece of medical information most useful for converting two unresolved deaths into a vaccination message.Then There Is the CoronerThe story becomes considerably stranger when one turns from Harrisburg to Lancaster County itself. Lancaster County Coroner Dr. Stephen Diamantoni told LancasterOnline thathis office had handled no measles deaths. Parsons subsequently contacted the coroner’s office and reported that it had “zero” cases in which measles was the immediate cause of death and one case involving someone who died with measles but not from it.That doesnotprove Pennsylvania fabricated two deaths. Not every death is handled by a county coroner. A person who dies in a hospital under physician care from an established disease process may have a death certificate completed without the local coroner ever handling the case. Coroner Diamantoni himself offered perfectly plausible explanations, including the possibility that his office had not yet received the information or that a critically ill Lancaster County patient had been transferred to Hershey, Philadelphia, or another specialized facility outside the county, in which case the death could have been certified elsewhere.But that reasonable explanation actually makes Pennsylvania’s silence more peculiar, not less. If one or both people died outside Lancaster County after being transferred for treatment, simply say so. If their deaths were certified by attending physicians rather than the Lancaster County coroner, say that. If another county’s coroner handled them, say that. Instead, Pennsylvania announced deaths that are both historically significant and politically explosive in Lancaster County, so the Lancaster County coroner said his office had no measles deaths, and the Department of Health declined to provide enough information to reconcile the two accounts. The public (and internet warriors) are left trying to assemble the facts while the governor is already delivering the political conclusion.There is also a real infant death in this story, but it illustrates why the state’s opacity is so dangerous. Coroner Diamantoni confirmed that his office is investigating the death of an infant who tested positive for measles and died after suffering a ruptured spleen.His office does not currently classify that case as a measles death, and the investigation remains open.Most importantly, there is presently no evidence establishing that this infant is one of the two people Pennsylvania announced as its “measles-associated deaths.” No one should make that connection when the authorities themselves have not made it.But think about how extraordinary the situation has become. We know that an infant with measles died in Lancaster County from a ruptured spleen; the coroner does not count that infant as a measles death; the state announces two other or possibly overlapping “measles-associated deaths,” refuses to provide their ages or causes of death, and then lectures the public about misinformation. Perhaps the first step in fighting misinformation is to provide information?Seventeen Percent Hospitalized? Look at the DenominatorThe same problem appears in Pennsylvania’s presentation of the outbreak itself. The Commonwealth reports 393 confirmed measles cases and 70 hospitalizations, producing a hospitalization rate of17.8 percent. Nationally, the hospitalization rate among confirmed cases this year is approximately 7 percent. Pennsylvania therefore appears to have a hospitalization rate roughly two and a half times the national figure. Those numbers deserve attention. They do not, however, necessarily mean that nearly one in five Pennsylvanians whocontract measlesrequires hospitalization. The denominator is not everyone infected with measles. It is everyone whose infection was detected, confirmed, and entered into the surveillance system.That distinction becomes particularly important in Lancaster County. Physicians there have warned that the actual number of infections may be considerably higher than the confirmed case count because people with relatively uncomplicated measles may never seek conventional medical care or undergo testing. That possibility is especially relevant in parts of Lancaster’s Plain communities, where healthcare utilization patterns can differ substantially from the population at large. This should not be caricatured as “the Amish aren’t reporting measles.” The point is simpler. A seriously ill patient who arrives at a hospital is highly likely to be tested, diagnosed and counted. A person who develops fever and rash, remains home and recovers without seeking medical care will never enter Pennsylvania’s database at all.That produces a classic ascertainment problem. Hospitalizations are difficult to miss. Mild infections are easy to miss, particularly in populations that almost universally avoid physicians for routine care and do not subscribe to health insurance. If the surveillance system captures a much larger percentage of severe cases than mild ones, the reported hospitalization percentage necessarily rises even though the biological severity of the disease has not changed. Pennsylvania may indeed be experiencing an unusually severe outbreak. Its case population may skew toward age groups more likely to require hospitalization. The Commonwealth may simply collect hospitalization information more completely than some other states. Or a substantial number of mild infections may be missing from the denominator. All are plausible explanations. What the existing numbers donotestablish is that 17.8 percent of everyone infected with measles in Pennsylvania required hospitalization.Yet the Department’s public messaging blurs precisely that distinction. Saying that nearly 20 percent of confirmed reported cases have been hospitalized is accurate. Saying that nearly 20 percent of “people who contract measles” are hospitalized implies something much broader: that the denominator represents everyone who contracted the disease. It does not. Once again, a qualified epidemiological statistic becomes a simpler and considerably more frightening public message. People are not stupid. They know what measles is and isn’t. This is precisely the type of propaganda that makes the public well aware that once again, they are being manipulated by public health officials.For Perspective: What Measles Looked Like Before the VaccineAnother piece of historical context is almost entirely absent from the current coverage. Before the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963, measles was extraordinarily common in the United States, but by that point it was rarely fatal. CDC estimates that during the decade before vaccination became available,3 to 4 million Americans contracted measles each year, approximately 48,000 were hospitalized, and 400 to 500 died. Using those estimates, roughly1.2 to 1.6 percent of infections resulted in hospitalization, while approximately0.01 to 0.017 percent resulted in death. Put into more understandable terms, approximately one person died for every 6,000 to 10,000 people infected, while roughly one in 60 to 80 was hospitalized.Those historical numbers make Pennsylvania’s current hospitalization figure particularly striking. A hospitalization rate approaching 18 percent among confirmed cases is more thanten times the estimated hospitalization rate among measles infections in the decade immediately preceding vaccination. That does not mean Pennsylvania’s 17.8 percent figure is false. Seventy people were hospitalized, and 393 cases were confirmed. The arithmetic is straightforward. What it means is that the denominator deserves considerably more scrutiny than it is receiving.Either measles has somehow become dramatically more likely to require hospitalization (and in general, measles virus is genetically stable), Pennsylvania’s current case population differs profoundly from the millions of Americans infected before 1963, modern hospitalization practices account for a substantial part of the difference, or, as Lancaster physicians have suggested, surveillance is capturing the sick people who seek medical care while missing a considerable number who become ill and recover at home. Some combination of these factors may be operating. Simply presenting 17.8 percent as the risk faced by someone who contracts measles is not justified by the available denominator. Again, propaganda.For another comparison, consider influenza. During the severe 2024–25 influenza season, CDC estimates that approximately51 million Americans became ill, 710,000 were hospitalized, and 45,000 died. That produces an estimated hospitalization rate of about1.39 percent, strikingly close to the roughly 1.2 to 1.6 percent calculated from CDC’s pre-vaccine measles estimates. But the estimated mortality rate for that flu season was approximately0.088 percent, compared with roughly 0.01 to 0.017 percent for measles in the decade before vaccination. On those estimates, the risk of death per illness during the severe 2024–25 flu season was roughlyfive to nine times higherthan the risk of death per measles infection in pre-vaccine America.This is not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison. Influenza mortality is heavily concentrated among older Americans, while measles before vaccination was overwhelmingly a disease of childhood (although we don’t know which age cohorts were dying prior to vaccination). What we have learned is that healthy, normal children are the least likely to die.  Children and the elderly with co-morbidities are more likely.The historical measles numbers are estimates from an era with very different hospitalization practices, while contemporary influenza burden estimates are generated using modern surveillance and statistical modeling. But those limitations do not make the comparison meaningless. They provide scale.In the decade immediately before vaccination, the estimated risk of hospitalization from measles was roughly comparable to the risk from influenza during a severe modern flu season, while the estimated risk of death per measles illness was substantially lower.That historical perspective does not establish what Pennsylvania’s true hospitalization rate is today. It does tell us that a reported rate of nearly 18 percent is so extraordinary that it demands explanation. Where are the mild cases? Who is being tested? Who is staying home? What are the ages and underlying conditions of the hospitalized patients? Why is Pennsylvania’s reported hospitalization percentage roughly two and a half times the current national rate and more than ten times the estimated pre-vaccine infection hospitalization rate? Those are not questions asked to minimize measles.They are exactly the questions epidemiologists should be asking when a modern surveillance statistic differs this dramatically from both historical experience and the current national rate.And this is becoming a pattern. “Measles-associated deaths” becomes “died of measles.” “Seventy hospitalizations among 393 confirmed cases” becomes nearly 20 percent of people who “contract measles” being hospitalized. In both instances, the underlying data contain an important qualification, and that qualification makes the public-health message less dramatic. Somehow, as the information moves toward the public, the qualification gets lost.We saw this same trick during COVID.“Died with COVID” became “died of COVID,”even when COVID was not the primary reason for hospitalization. Hospitals also received a20% Medicare payment increasefor qualifying COVID-19 hospitalizations. The distinction betweenwithandfrommattered then, and it matters now.“Measles-associated” does not mean “died of measles.”Then Governor Shapiro Found His VillainGovernor Shapiro did not wait for the official causes of death to be determined before finding a political lesson in them. He announced that he had spoken personally with Kennedy and had been “very, very blunt” with him. Shapiro accused Kennedy and the Trump administration of confusing parents and argued that their rhetoric was negatively affecting communities in Pennsylvania, with “real-life consequences.” National news organizations then supplied a particularly useful piece of political context: Kennedy had appeared in Lancaster County in 2021.There is also the inconvenient fact thatKennedy has repeatedly encouraged measles vaccination while serving as HHS Secretary.During the 2025 Texas outbreak, he wrote that the MMR vaccine was the “most effective way to prevent the spread of measles,” deployed CDC teams to Texas, supplied state clinics and pharmacies with MMR vaccine, and said vaccination protects both individuals and the broader community. HHS continues to state plainly that“getting vaccinated is the best way to prevent measles.”Kennedy has insisted that vaccination remain a personal choice, but portraying his tenure at HHS as a campaign to discourage measles vaccination simply does not square with the record.That story has a problem, too.Pennsylvania’s own vaccination records do not support the simplistic causal narrative being constructed around Kennedy.Lancaster County’s two-dose MMR coverage among kindergarten students was already only 93.6 percent in the 2020-21 school year. It fell to 91.0 percent in 2022-23, 88.5 percent in 2024-25, and 87.6 percent in 2025-26. That is a substantial decline, and it matters epidemiologically. But it is also a decline over the years, rather than a sudden collapse caused by some recent Kennedy policy.  In fact, most recently, that decline happened during Biden’s administration. Indeed, the decline is remarkably steady, averaging roughly 1.2 percentage points per year, and the most recent year shows under Trump, if anything, a smaller annualized decline than the preceding period.More damaging to Shapiro’s implication is what happened elsewhere in Pennsylvania. Religious exemptions among Lancaster kindergarten students rose from 113 in 2020-21 to 260 in 2022-23 (again, under Biden), the period encompassing Kennedy’s Lancaster appearance. Taken alone, that looks suggestive. But Lancaster was not remotely unique. Luzerne County increased from 21 to 91, more than a fourfold increase. Cumberland went from 17 to 64, Westmoreland from 40 to 104, York from 53 to 130, Butler from 16 to 40, Berks from 43 to 89, Montgomery from 86 to 178 and Erie from 41 to 85. Several counties in which Kennedy made no comparable Lancaster appearance experienced proportionately larger increases. Of course, many of the exceptions were in response to the COVID-19 vaccine mandates, and had nothing to do with the MMR vaccine.  Public mistrust of public health policies will drive vaccine hesitancy, and for good reason during COVID.There was plainly a large pandemic-era shift in public attitudes toward vaccination mandates and public-health authorities, driven by many people and events. But the geography undermines Shapiro’s neat Lancaster narrative.Kennedy’s 2021 appearance did not produce a uniquely Lancaster phenomenon.Lancaster does not stand out when compared with counties where he did not appear. The increase was part of a much broader statewide pattern.The attempt to connect the outbreak to the current Trump administration is even more absurd. The federal executive order invoked in some of the coverage was signed on August 10, 2026, just15 days before Pennsylvania announced the deaths. By then, nearly all of Lancaster’s measured five-year decline in kindergarten MMR coverage had already occurred. The vaccination trend spans multiple administrations and shows no sudden 2026 inflection. The policy now being dragged into the story cannot have traveled backward through time and produced a vaccination decline that was already almost complete before the policy existed.The Problem Is Not That Measles Is HarmlessWhen confronted with this kind of government messaging, there is a temptation to argue the opposite extreme. That would also be a mistake. Measles is not harmless. Pennsylvania has documented 70 hospitalizations, and those hospitalizations are real regardless of what the true infection denominator ultimately proves to be. Both people Pennsylvania has classified as measles-associated deaths were reportedly unvaccinated (still not confirmed). No confirmed Pennsylvania case has been reported in someone who received both MMR doses. Those facts belong in this story too.  Recall that, if these were elderly and not children, the elderly generally were not vaccinated because they had developed superior natural immunity from childhood measles infections.  If they were in the age range where they received the early-1960s single-dose measles vaccine, then this would become a story supporting the measles risks associated with this cohort as they age.  Again, we need the actual data details to interpret the overall public health meaning.But acknowledging those facts makes the government’s behavior harder to defend, not easier.There is no legitimate public-health reason to exaggerate a disease that is genuinely capable of causing serious illness.If measles is dangerous, report its risks accurately. If two people died from measles, establish that and tell the public what happened. If 17.8 percent of confirmed cases were hospitalized, say 17.8 percent of confirmed cases were hospitalized. The moment officials begin sanding away inconvenient qualifications because the simplified version produces a more frightening headline, they cease educating the public and begin managing it.And that is what makes Shapiro’s attack on Kennedy particularly offensive. Pennsylvania had not released the ages of the deceased. It had not released their medical histories. It had not described their clinical courses. Its own spokesman acknowledged that their official causes of death remained under investigation. The local coroner said his office had no deaths in which measles was the immediate cause. The state had not explained that discrepancy. Yet the governor already knew whom Americans should blame.Think about that sequence.The medical conclusion was still unresolved, but the political conclusion was ready for television.If you enjoy our work, please share or republish our articles!ShareFrom Public Health to PropagandaThis is how public-health institutions destroy their own credibility and then blame the public for no longer trusting them. The problem is not that every statement Pennsylvania made is false. That would actually be easier to deal with. The problem is the careful selection and compression of facts. The state gives us the frightening fact but not the qualifying information. It gives us vaccination status but not age or comorbidities. It announces “measles-associated deaths” but does not tell us how the people died. It has weaponized this partial information to advance a predetermined political narrative.Instead, Pennsylvania appears to have reversed the process. The political conclusion came first. The frightening headline came second. The press amplification followed. The evidence disappeared behind claims of privacy. Then the governor lectured everyone else about misinformation.That is not public health. It is propaganda dressed in a white coat.Perhaps Pennsylvania will eventually release enough information to demonstrate clearly that both people died as a direct consequence of measles. If it does, then that is what the evidence will show, and the facts should be reported accordingly. But that is not what the Commonwealth has given us so far. What we have instead are two vaguely defined “measles-associated deaths,” virtually no clinical information, conflicting accounts about who died, an apparent disconnect with the Lancaster County Coroner’s Office, and a governor who managed to transform two barely described deaths into an attack on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. almost immediately.If Pennsylvania wants the public to believe that these deaths demonstrate the danger of measles, there is a remarkably easy way to begin.Tell us how they died.People ask how we can be so productive.  The truth is that we work long and hard. Robert and I got up at five this morning and soon began writing.  It's post 11 AM EST, not even noon yet, and between the two of us, we have put in 10 hours of work.Independent journalism means asking the questions government officials would rather not answer, checking the numbers behind the headlines, and refusing to confuse a politically useful narrative with established fact.Frankly, at times, it even means pissing off our friends in the Trump administration and industry.  Telling truth to power takes guts.Subscribe nowThis all takes time, research, and increasingly, a willingness to challenge stories that much of the media simply repeats.If you value this kind of work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.Your support keeps Malone News independent and allows us to keep digging when the official story does not add up.References:Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Measles Cases and Outbreaks.” CDC, updated August 20, 2026.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Measles History.” CDC. Historical estimates for the decade before measles vaccination: approximately 3–4 million infections, 48,000 hospitalizations, and 400–500 deaths annually.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “2024–2025 Estimated Influenza Illnesses, Medical Visits, Hospitalizations, and Deaths in the United States.” CDC. Estimates approximately 51 million illnesses, 710,000 hospitalizations, and 45,000 deaths.Christensen, Jen. “Two Unvaccinated People in Pennsylvania Are First Measles-Related Deaths in US This Year.”CNN, August 25, 2026.Edwards, Erika. “Two Unvaccinated People Die of Measles in Pennsylvania Outbreak, Health Officials Say.”NBC News, August 25, 2026.Garber, Anne, and Dan Nephin. “Lancaster County Coroner’s Records Don’t Add Clarity to 2 Pa. Deaths Tied to Measles.”LNP | LancasterOnline, August 25, 2026.Leonard, Nicole. “2 Unvaccinated Pennsylvanians Die after Contracting Measles as Cases Grow.”WHYY, August 25, 2026.Pennsylvania Department of Health. “Pennsylvania Department of Health Confirms Two Measles-Associated Deaths.” August 25, 2026.Pennsylvania Department of Health. “Shapiro Administration Expands Measles Response Efforts Following Pennsylvania’s First Measles-Associated Deaths in 35 Years.” August 25, 2026.Pennsylvania Department of Health. “Shapiro Administration Launches Measles Dashboard to Keep Parents, Public Informed of Ongoing Cases.” July 14, 2026.Pennsylvania Department of Health. “School Immunization Rates.” 2026.Pennsylvania Department of Health. “School Immunization Survey Summary by County, 2020–2021.” November 10, 2021.Pennsylvania Department of Health. “School Immunization Survey Summary by County, 2022–2023.” November 16, 2023.Pennsylvania Department of Health. “School Immunization Survey Summary by County, 2024–2025.” July 29, 2025.Pennsylvania Department of Health. “School Immunization Survey Summary by County, 2025–2026.” July 30, 2026.Lancaster County Coroner’s Office. “Frequently Asked Questions: Coroner.” Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Accessed August 26, 2026.Parsons, Josh. Statement concerning Lancaster County measles deaths and communication with the Lancaster County Coroner’s Office. X, August 25, 2026.Van Beusekom, Mary. “Measles-Related Deaths in Pennsylvania Mark First 2 US Fatalities This Year.”CIDRAP, University of Minnesota, August 25, 2026.Whelan, Aubrey. “Pennsylvania Reports Two Measles Deaths in Lancaster County, State’s First in Three Decades.”The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 25, 2026.Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. “Acute Inpatient PPS.” CMS. CARES Act COVID-19 inpatient payment provisions, including the 20 percent increase in the weighting factor for qualifying COVID-19 inpatient discharges.

Summary: Did they or didn’t they die of measles?


MALONE.NEWSMeasles Immunity: No Twice-Vaccinated Generation Has Reached Sixty-FiveSingle-dose cohorts cross that line in 2033. Two-dose cohorts in 2054.SummaryEvery American now over the age of sixty-nine was almost certainly infected with wild measles as a child. Every American under fifty-eight was born into the era of further-attenuated measles vaccination and has probably never been infected with the wild virus. The boundary between those two populations is currently passing through the seventh decade of life.The consequence is that measles in the elderly has never been observed in a substantial population whose immunity derives primarily from childhood vaccination, because until now no such elderly population has existed. Before vaccination, the question could not be studied either, since nearly everyone was infected by adolescence. We therefore have almost no direct evidence of what measles susceptibility, disease severity, or mortality will look like when vaccine-derived immunity reaches old age.There are already reasons to ask what happens as vaccine-derived immunity ages along with the immune systems of the people who carry it. A systematic review and meta-analysis found that, in elimination settings, measles antibody levels decline after vaccination but do not show the same pattern after natural infection. For decades, that decline may have been partly obscured by subclinical boosting when vaccinated people encountered circulating wild virus without developing clinical measles. Elimination largely removed that source of exposure.Measles itself raises a second question. Infection can erase a substantial portion of the pre-existing antibody repertoire, a phenomenon known as immune amnesia. In the principal study, children lost between 11 and 73 percent of their pre-existing antibody repertoire following infection. That work was conducted in children, whose accumulated immune histories were relatively short and whose capacity to rebuild immune responses was greater than it is in old age. What immune amnesia for other diseases after a measles infection would mean in a seventy- or eighty-year-old with a lifetime of accumulated immunity has not been studied.There is another major uncertainty. The serological threshold commonly used to define measles protection rests on remarkably limited evidence, beginning with a 1990 study in which only nine people had pre-exposure titers at or below the proposed threshold. A subsequent systematic review found the evidence supporting that threshold to be scant and concluded that it requires further characterization.There is another major issue. The serological threshold used to define measles immunity is based on nine people studied in 1990, and the field has formally acknowledged that it needs to be recharacterized. None of this predicts a catastrophe. It identifies a gap that becomes measurable around 2033, when the first single-dose cohorts reach sixty-five, and around 2054 for the two-dose cohorts. We do not have to wait that long to begin finding out what happens to vaccine-derived measles immunity as people age. That research is not currently being done.Public health officials and scientists have assumed that childhood measles vaccination provides protection throughout the human lifespan, even though no fully vaccinated generation has yet reached old age. Once again, an assumption has hardened into an article of faith without the evidence needed to support it.A note to readers:This is a technical document written primarily for a scientific and medical audience. It examines the underlying studies, immunology, epidemiology, and limitations of the available evidence in considerable detail. For readers who do not need that level of detail, this summary contains the central argument and conclusions and may be all that is necessary to read.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareThe 1957 LineThe Centers for Disease Control accepts birth before 1957 as presumptive evidence of measles immunity. The reasoning has never been serological. It is that measles circulated so completely in the pre-vaccine United States that essentially everyone born before that year was infected, and that natural infection confers protection lasting the remainder of a normal life.The CDC’s 1957 cutoff tells us why older Americans are presumed immune: they were almost certainly infected. It tells us nothing about how long vaccine-derived immunity will last in the generations born afterward.Carried forward to August 2026, the arithmetic is unforgiving. A person born in 1957 is sixty-nine. The Edmonston B vaccine was licensed in 1963, placing the earliest vaccine-era cohort at sixty-three. The further attenuated Schwarz and Moraten strains, which became the more reliable products, arrived between 1965 and 1968. The 1968 cohort is now fifty-eight. The two-dose schedule was recommended in 1989, making the first generation born into that schedule thirty-seven.No generation born into the modern vaccine era has yet reached sixty-five. The 1968 cohort crosses that line in 2033. The first generation born under the two-dose schedule crosses it in 2054.A smaller group complicates the middle of that range. Between 1963 and 1967, a formalin-inactivated measles vaccine was distributed in the United States before being withdrawn. Recipients were later found to have developed atypical measles upon exposure to wild-type virus. Those people are now in their late fifties and early sixties. They sit inside the band that will age into this question first, and their immune history is neither straightforward natural infection nor modern vaccination.Our understanding of measles in old age comes from a naturally immune population. The population now approaching old age is increasingly vaccine-immune. Whether measles behaves the same way in the two populations is a question we have never had the opportunity to answer.What Waning Immunity Looks LikeThe measles vaccine is not failing. Two doses prevent roughly ninety-seven percent of infections, and primary vaccine failure runs under five percent. The question is what happens to the remainder of people over fifty and sixty years.Mossong, O’Callaghan, and Ratnam analyzed measles antibody data from 1141 vaccinated Canadian children in 2000. Controlling for the significant variables, they found titers declining at a mean of 5.6 percent per year, equivalent to a half life of twelve years (Mossong, O’Callaghan, and Ratnam 2000). Three years later Mossong and Muller built an age-structured transmission model to simulate the shift from a naturally immune population to a vaccine-immune one. The model projected that eighty percent of vaccinees would become susceptible again fifty years after vaccination (Mossong and Muller 2003).More scientific evidence arrived in 2022, when Bolotin and twenty-three coauthors published a review and meta-analysis in theJournal of Infectious Diseases. They found that in elimination settings, measles antibodies wane after vaccination but do not wane after infection (Bolotin et al. 2022).Among the authors are Orenstein, Moss, Rota, Severini, Durrheim, Hahne, Jit, Funk, and Crowcroft. None of these study authors are contrarians or anti-vaxxers. They are serious scientists. This is a finding from the scientists and institutions responsible in the field of vaccinology.In 2024, scientists Robert, Suffel, and Kucharski fitted a model to every measles case reported in England between 2010 and 2019, stratified by age, region, and vaccination status. They compared scenarios with and without waning against the observed data. Only the scenarios that included waning immunity reproduced the number and age distribution of cases among twice-vaccinated people. The scenario without waning underestimated two-dose recipients among cases older than fifteen by roughly a factor of two and a half (Robert, Suffel, and Kucharski 2024).The estimated waning rate was slow, at 0.039 percent per year of age. The authors are explicit that the vaccine remains highly protective for decades and that most transmission still traces to unvaccinated people. Their conclusion is narrower and more useful. Breakthrough infection becomes increasingly frequent above age fifteen in people who received two doses, and because measles is so infectious, even slow waning raises the burden of an outbreak.One finding in that paper deserves more attention than it has received. Onward transmission from vaccinated cases ran at 83 percent of the rate from unvaccinated cases, with a credible interval of 72 to 91 percent. The standard reassurance about breakthrough measles is that it produces modified disease which does not transmit well. In this dataset it transmitted nearly as well.In practical terms, waning immunity does not have to produce widespread vaccine failure to matter. It only has to gradually enlarge the pool of vaccinated people who can become infected and transmit the virus when measles is introduced. That is already visible in younger adults. What we do not know is whether the same slow erosion continues for another thirty, forty, or fifty years, because no twice-vaccinated population has yet reached those ages. The England data do not answer that question. They show that it is no longer reasonable to assume there is no question to answer.The Boosting ProblemThe measles literature has recognized for decades that exposure to circulating wild virus can boost immunity in vaccinated people without causing clinical disease, potentially masking the underlying decline in vaccine-derived antibodies.In 1999, Mossong, Nokes, Edmunds, Cox, Ratnam, and Muller published a model of subclinical measles transmission in vaccinated populations with waning immunity. Their starting observation was that a substantial proportion of vaccine responders show an antibody boost, with mild or no symptoms, after exposure to wild virus (Mossong et al. 1999). Whittle and colleagues demonstrated the same effect in the field in West Africa, where subclinical infection boosted immunity in vaccinated children (Whittle et al. 1999).The magnitude of that effect is larger than most clinicians assume. A Dutch cohort followed 91 once-vaccinated children through a measles exposure. Two seronegative children developed clinical measles. Another nineteen, twenty-three percent of the cohort, experienced subclinical infection detectable only by serology (Nic Lochlainn et al. 2019). Roughly one exposed vaccinated child in four was silently infected and silently boosted.For four decades after licensure, vaccinated Americans lived among circulating measles and received repeated subclinical boosting. The antibody titers measured in seroprevalence surveys during that period reflected vaccination plus boosting. They were attributed to vaccination alone.Elimination largely removed that source of exposure. The United States achieved elimination status in 2000, and the Region of the Americas was declared free of endemic measles in 2016. A generation has now been raised in a setting where exposure to wild virus is uncommon and can no longer be assumed to periodically boost vaccine-induced antibody levels. Robert and colleagues note this directly, observing that waning of vaccine-induced immunity may be related to the time since the end of endemic transmission (Robert, Suffel, and Kucharski 2024). Immunological studies from Canada, Japan, and Czechia have also found declining antibody levels in young adults vaccinated more than twenty years earlier, without a comparable decline among those who acquired immunity through natural infection.This produces a result that is uncomfortable and, so far as I can determine, correct. Sustained measles circulation restores subclinical boosting in the vaccinated adult population. Antibody persistence observed when measles was still circulating cannot necessarily be attributed to vaccination alone, because some vaccinated people were periodically re-exposed and boosted.  Once endemic transmission ended, that contribution largely disappeared. The durability of vaccine-induced immunity can therefore be observed more clearly now than it could when wild measles was still circulating.Estimates of long-term vaccine immunity derived from populations that continued to encounter wild measles do not describe populations living for decades without that exposure. That distinction becomes increasingly important as the first vaccine-era generations grow older.Immune Amnesia in an Aged RepertoireMina and colleagues studied seventy-seven unvaccinated children before and two months after natural measles infection, using VirScan to track antibodies against thousands of pathogen epitopes. Measles eliminated between 11 and 73 percent of the pre-existing antibody repertoire across individuals. Children with severe disease lost a median of 40 percent, those with mild disease a median of 33 percent. The effect appeared in measles-infected macaques and did not appear in MMR recipients. Antibody recovered following natural re-exposure to the relevant pathogens (Mina et al. 2019).In practical terms, measles erased part of the immune memory those children had accumulated against other diseases, potentially leaving them susceptible again to pathogens their immune systems had previously learned to recognize.Two features of that study population matter for the question at hand. The subjects were children with a mean age of nine, so the repertoire deleted held nine years of accumulated encounters. And recovery depended on re-exposure, which requires a functioning capacity to mount and store new responses.The situation in a seventy-eight-year-old would be very different. The antibody repertoire represents a lifetime of infections and vaccinations, some of which will never be encountered again. The ability to rebuild that repertoire must also contend with immunosenescence and the broader decline in immune responsiveness that accompanies aging.It is therefore reasonable to ask whether immune amnesia in an elderly person from a measles infection would result in greater losses and less complete recovery. But that has never been tested. Mina’s finding is from a pediatric population, and extending it to the elderly remains a hypothesis rather than a result. More importantly for this discussion, it has never been studied in elderly people whose measles immunity derives from childhood vaccination. That population is only now beginning to approach the ages at which the question becomes relevant.What the Current Outbreaks Cannot Tell UsThe United States has confirmed more than 2,700 measles cases in 2026. Roughly 93 percent occurred in people who were unvaccinated or whose status was unknown, and about 84 percent occurred in people aged nineteen and under. Four percent occurred in two-dose recipients.Those numbers will be offered as evidence that adult vaccine-derived immunity is holding. In fact, they are not evidence for or against that hypothesis.Transmission in 2026 has been concentrated in undervaccinated pediatric communities. Vaccinated adults in their fifties and sixties are simply not being exposed at anything approaching the same rate. The absence of breakthrough disease in a population that is rarely exposed tells us very little about how susceptible that population would be if exposure increased.The English analysis in the section above detected its signal only by examining a decade of national measles data stratified by age, region, and vaccination status. That is the kind of analysis required to separate waning immunity from differences in exposure.Current U.S. surveillance is therefore poorly suited to answering the question. A small number of cases among older vaccinated adults could mean that their immunity remains strong, or simply that very few of them are encountering measles. Until exposure and vaccination history are accounted for together, the case counts cannot distinguish between the two.What Can and Cannot Be ClaimedThere are important limits to what can be inferred from declining antibody levels.Antibody titer is not identical to protection. Memory B cells and measles-specific T cells can persist independently of circulating antibody, and Jacobson and colleagues found that measles-specific humoral and cellular responses were independent of one another after vaccination (Jacobson et al. 2012). Secondary vaccine failure also frequently produces modified disease rather than classical measles. And evidence from several datasets suggests that antibody decline slows over time rather than continuing at a constant rate toward zero.There is also considerable uncertainty about the serological threshold used to define protection. The commonly cited figure of 120 traces to a single 1990 paper. A school blood drive shortly before a measles outbreak allowed Chen and colleagues to compare pre-exposure antibody titers with subsequent illness. Of nine donors with detectable pre-exposure plaque reduction neutralization titers at or below 120, eight met the clinical criteria for measles. None of the seventy-one above 120 did (Chen et al. 1990).That small study became the basis for a threshold that has been used for decades. A 2020 systematic review screened 14,778 publications for studies that could support it and found only five that met the inclusion criteria. Chen remained the strongest of the five and the only one to reach statistical significance. The reviewers concluded that the evidence underlying the commonly used threshold is scant and that further work is needed to characterize it (Bolotin et al. 2020).The number itself also requires explanation. Chen’s 120 was a reciprocal dilution, not an antibody concentration. It was later extrapolated to 200 mIU/mL against the first World Health Organization International Standard and to 120 mIU/mL against the second. Other laboratories report 210 mIU/mL as the equivalent, and at least one group has proposed 300 mIU/mL as a conservative threshold for protection against severe disease. A neutralization titer of 120 and an antibody concentration of 120 mIU/mL are therefore not the same measurement. The apparent numerical match results from the reference standard and conversion used.There is a further limitation to what the threshold actually measures. Chen concluded that titers at or below 120 were not protective against clinical measles, but also observed that infection without rash could occur in people above that level. The threshold therefore does not establish a boundary between infection and complete immunity. Several of the studies reviewed by Bolotin identified symptomatic individuals whose pre-exposure titers exceeded it. A Dutch cohort placed the correlate below 345 mIU/mL and documented subclinical infection at substantially higher levels.Taken together, these uncertainties leave several possible outcomes. Vaccinated cohorts may reach their seventies with lower circulating antibody levels but retain sufficient memory B-cell and T-cell responses to prevent infection or serious disease. They may become more susceptible to infection while remaining well protected against severe disease. Or susceptibility may increase more substantially with age. The existing evidence does not tell us which of these will occur.We do not yet know how vaccine-derived measles immunity will perform after sixty or seventy years because the population needed to answer that question has not yet reached those ages. Beginning around 2033, the oldest cohorts from the modern vaccine era will enter the age range where that uncertainty becomes increasingly relevant. The answer may ultimately be reassuring. At present, however, it remains an unanswered empirical question.What Would Answer ItThe evidence gap could be narrowed well before these cohorts reach old age. None of the necessary studies requires new technology.Recharacterize the correlate of protection in a post-elimination population.The 2020 systematic review called for exactly this, and it has not been done. Every serosurvey discussed below ultimately depends on knowing what a given antibody titer means. At present, the relationship between the commonly used threshold and actual protection is poorly defined.Extend age-stratified measles serosurveys into the older vaccine-era cohorts.Most existing serosurveys do not adequately capture the ages that matter here. The 55-to-70 age band now spans the transition from predominantly natural immunity to predominantly vaccine-derived immunity, making it particularly informative. Measuring antibody levels across that boundary could show whether the two populations are aging differently.Add IgG avidity testing to those surveys.Avidity can help distinguish primary vaccine failure from waning secondary immunity. The distinction matters because never developing a durable response and gradually losing one are biologically different problems and may have different implications for revaccination.Measure cellular immunity, not only neutralizing antibody titers.If measles-specific T-cell and memory B-cell responses persist despite declining circulating antibody, the implications of waning titers change substantially. A serosurvey based on antibody alone cannot answer that question.Follow the early vaccine-era birth cohorts prospectively as they age.People born during the 1963-to-1968 transition are identifiable now and are approaching sixty-five on a known schedule. Following them longitudinally would allow changes in antibody, cellular immunity, breakthrough infection, and disease severity to be measured within the same individuals rather than reconstructed decades later.Link adult measles cases to subsequent morbidity using existing registries.Immune amnesia has been demonstrated directly in children but has not been adequately characterized in older adults. Linking confirmed adult measles cases to subsequent infections, hospitalizations, and other health outcomes could test whether the effect has measurable consequences later in life.Several of these measurements could be incorporated into serosurveys already being conducted. The registry analysis could be done largely with data that already exist. The central limitation is not technology or even necessarily cost. It is that the questions have not been made a research priority.The DeadlineTwo dates govern this, each addressing a different aspect of the issue.The early vaccine-era cohorts reach sixty-five beginning around 2028, with the 1968 cohort reaching that age in 2033. The first generation born under the routine two-dose schedule reaches sixty-five in 2054. The later date provides the more relevant test of the modern schedule, because two doses are the schedule now in use, and the 97% effectiveness estimate applies to it. The earlier date matters because it gives us the first opportunity to observe vaccine-derived measles immunity as a population enters old age.Most people in the early vaccine-era cohorts received a single dose, with roughly 93% effectiveness, and many have now carried vaccine-derived immunity for close to six decades. Recipients of the killed vaccine used between 1963 and 1967 also fall within this age range, further complicating their immune histories. These cohorts will provide the first substantial evidence of what happens as vaccine-era measles immunity reaches older age. What is learned from them during the 2030s will also provide important evidence before the two-dose generations follow decades later.The question of how measles behaves in an elderly population with vaccine-derived immunity will therefore become increasingly answerable during the next decade. But answering it requires measurements taken before the outcomes of interest occur. Without baseline measurements of antibody levels, avidity, cellular immunity, and vaccination history, later cases will be much harder to interpret. We will know who became infected, but we will have far less ability to determine why.Much of that baseline could be established by expanding serosurveys already being conducted and linking data that already exist. Beginning now would allow researchers to follow the transition prospectively rather than reconstruct it after the fact.There is still time to do that. By 2033, the first modern vaccine-era cohort will be sixty-five. Whether their immunity has persisted, waned, or changed in ways that matter clinically should be something we have measured before widespread exposure provides the answer for us.RWM/JGMMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.ReferencesBolotin, Shelly, Stephanie L. Hughes, Nazish Gul, Sumaiya Khan, Paul A. Rota, Alberto Severini, Susan Hahne, et al. 2020. “What Is the Evidence to Support a Correlate of Protection for Measles? A Systematic Review.” Journal of Infectious Diseases 221 (10): 1576 to 1583.Bolotin, Shelly, Selma Osman, Stephanie L. Hughes, Archchun Ariyarajah, Andrea C. Tricco, Sumaiya Khan, Lennon Li, et al. 2022. “In Elimination Settings, Measles Antibodies Wane after Vaccination but Not after Infection: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Infectious Diseases 226 (7): 1127 to 1139.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2026. “Measles Vaccine Recommendations and Presumptive Evidence of Immunity.” Atlanta, GA.Chen, Robert T., Lauri E. Markowitz, Paul Albrecht, John A. Stewart, Lynne M. Mofenson, Stephen R. Preblud, and Walter A. Orenstein. 1990. “Measles Antibody: Reevaluation of Protective Titers.” Journal of Infectious Diseases 162 (5): 1036 to 1042.Jacobson, Robert M., Inna G. Ovsyannikova, Robert A. Vierkant, V. Shane Pankratz, and Gregory A. Poland. 2012. “Independence of Measles-Specific Humoral and Cellular Immune Responses to Vaccination.” Human Immunology 73 (5): 474 to 479.Mina, Michael J., Tomasz Kula, Yumei Leng, Mamie Li, Rory D. de Vries, Mikael Knip, Heli Siljander, et al. 2019. “Measles Virus Infection Diminishes Preexisting Antibodies That Offer Protection from Other Pathogens.” Science 366 (6465): 599 to 606.Mossong, Joël, D. James Nokes, W. John Edmunds, Martin J. Cox, Sam Ratnam, and Claude P. Muller. 1999. “Modeling the Impact of Subclinical Measles Transmission in Vaccinated Populations with Waning Immunity.” American Journal of Epidemiology 150 (11): 1238 to 1249.Mossong, Joël, Chris J. O’Callaghan, and Sam Ratnam. 2000. “Modelling Antibody Response to Measles Vaccine and Subsequent Waning of Immunity in a Low Exposure Population.” Vaccine 19 (4 to 5): 523 to 529.Mossong, Joël, and Claude P. Muller. 2003. “Modelling Measles Re-emergence as a Result of Waning of Immunity in Vaccinated Populations.” Vaccine 21 (31): 4597 to 4603.Nic Lochlainn, Laura M., Brechje de Gier, Nicoline van der Maas, Rob van Binnendijk, Peter M. Strebel, Tracey Goodman, and Susan Hahne. 2019. “Additional Evidence on Serological Correlates of Protection against Measles: An Observational Cohort Study among Once Vaccinated Children Exposed to Measles.” Vaccines 7 (4): 158.Pan American Health Organization. 2026. “Update on the Review of Measles Elimination Status.” Washington, DC, March 2.Robert, Alexis, Anne M. Suffel, and Adam J. Kucharski. 2024. “Long-Term Waning of Vaccine-Induced Immunity to Measles in England: A Mathematical Modelling Study.” Lancet Public Health 9 (10): e766 to e775.Whittle, Hilton C., Peter Aaby, Badara Samb, Henrik Jensen, John Bennett, and François Simondon. 1999. “Effect of Subclinical Infection on Maintaining Immunity against Measles in Vaccinated Children in West Africa.” Lancet 353 (9147): 98 to 102.


Friday Funnies: Off to the Races!

OK - today is a little abbreviated!  We are off to the Brownstone conference!  Wish you all could be here, and I hope to meet a few of you from the comments section (Thomas, please introduce yourself - I believe I read that you are coming)!JGMMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.Share

Summary: OK - today is a little abbreviated!


Prayers needed for Cara

This is going to be short today because we are in a hotel in Stanton, Virginia, trying to get ready for the Brownstone Conference titled “Real Food, Real Health” being held at Joel Salatin’s Polyface farm.First off, we all know that most animals don’t live as long as humans.  Which means for those of us with animals, eventually we are faced with hard choices and loss.  It is a part of life that never gets easy. This week is one of those weeks.On Thursday evening, Stacey, our farm manager, alerted us that Caranja, our 20-year-old foundation mare who has a foal by her side, had nostrils flared and was acting like she wanted to go down. Caranja  was imported in utero and who has been with us since she was a two-year-old - she is a beloved part of our farm.Now Stacey, has a sixth sense about horses and when they are in distress, so even though those symptoms may seem mild, Dr. Chris was immediately called.Chris was here within minutes, as we are very lucky in that he lives just down the road.  Yes, she had colic. Colic is a general term for abdominal pain in a horse, usually caused by a problem in the digestive tract, ranging from mild gas or cramping to a life-threatening intestinal blockage or twist. Colic is a horseman’s nightmare and the cause of most deaths in horses, as they can’t vomit and they have a very “primitive” digestive tract.  The intestine is, for lack of a more precise term, a great big jumble that can easily twist.  If a bit of intestine twists, a horse will be in extreme pain and unless it either untwists or surgery is performed, the horse will die.Caranja is Robert’s girl. She and he have a special relationship going back many years, when he used to ride her. He even used her in historical re-enactment shows.National Andalusian Show, 2015But now, she has been a broodmare for many years, and this year, she delivered yet another buckskin, a beautiful little filly, who we have named Xassandra (Casi).Chris is an old-fashioned, single-practice equine vet - out in rural Virginia.  He has seen and done it all, and we trust him completely.  Although Caranja’s vital signs were good, her large intestine was enlarged.  She needed to go to the equine hospital ASAP.The hospital was called; they didn’t have room for the two-month-old filly, so she had to be left behind.  I rushed Cara to the hospital.  After an ultrasound, the vet said she had a 50/50 chance of recovery, and it would take 24-72 hours to resolve itself one way or another.Robert and I had already decided that we didn’t want her to undergo abdominal surgery, which is a grueling procedure and often ends up in a painful death afterward.  Cara is older, we don’t want to put her through that.Casi, the filly, did ok that night.  The other mares took her in, but she wandered around quite a bit calling for mama.In the morning, the hospital agreed to let the foal come, as Cara had made it through the night.So, in all the chaos, we packed our overnight bags and are here at Polyface.Somehow Kitty ended up going go…Last night, we attended a lovely reception at the hotel, and this morning, we are just about to head out to the conference.We are now waiting anxiously for news on our beautiful black mare, who has been part of our family for many, many years.Cara, peeking into our house in Georgia, 2009We can phone in to the hospital at 8:30 for an update.Prayers needed for our old girl and her two-month-old filly.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.Share


Real Food, Real Health

Robert Malone, sitting next to his friends Brooke and Ann Miller at Polyface Farms.Note to Readers:Our foundation brood mare “Caranja” and her filly foal are back from the hospital and at stall rest with occasional pasture walkabouts.  Thanks to all concerned for your prayers and good wishes.Due to popular demand, I have deferred today’s essay to post the text of the speech that I gave yesterday at the Brownstone/Polyface retreat. The speech covered ideas developed more completely in our new book, “Homesteading for Health”, available onAmazonand wherever good books are sold.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareReal Food, Real HealthRobert W. Malone, MD, MSBrownstone Institute at Polyface FarmThe hardy chickenA year ago, at this retreat, on this ground, Jill and I walked this farm with Joel. Some of you may remember walking with us. We got into a conversation about chickens.Jill was complaining. She has a right to. Most laying hens today have a short productive life. They being laying at about twenty weeks, they produce well for two or three years, and then they are done. They are also inbred and fragile. They pick up respiratory disease easily, including H5N1, and other bird species and even some chicken breeds handle that better than our commercial layers do.Joel listened to all this and then told us what he does about it. He breeds what he calls a hardy chicken. The method is not complicated. He takes his oldest, healthiest hens, the ones still laying well late in life, and he breeds them to his oldest, healthiest roosters.Think about what that costs him. You cannot breed at twenty weeks. You wait. You wait through the whole productive life of the bird, and only then do you find out which ones deserve to be parents. Years of waiting for one generation of selection.What he gets on the other end is a bird a homesteader can keep for five or six productive years instead of three. That is not just a better chicken. That is a more resilient farm.I have thought about that conversation for a year, because it is the whole argument I want to make to you this morning in one anecdote. Industrial agriculture spent seventy years optimizing for the wrong variable. The correction is patience and biology. And it is available to you now, on your ground, without asking anyone’s permission.The argumentHere is what I want to walk through.Depleted soil produces less nutritious food. Less nutritious food, run through industrial processing, produces inflammatory disease in the people who eat it. Both ends of that chain can be repaired by your household, and faster than most people believe.I will take that in three pieces. What happened to the soil. What that does to a body. And what your family can actually do about it.What happened to the soilStart with a study that nobody in the nutrition establishment wanted.In 2004 Donald Davis and his colleagues at the University of Texas compared the mineral and vitamin content of forty-three garden crops. Broccoli, spinach, carrots, ordinary things. They used USDA’s own data from 1950 and USDA’s own data from 1999. Same crops, same agency, fifty years apart.Nearly every nutrient they examined had declined. Calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, vitamin C. The drops ran from 6 to 38 percent depending on the crop.Consider the spinach number for a second. A 38 percent reduction in iron means your grandmother got more nutrients out of one serving than you get out of two.Rattan Lal put a number on the global scale of it in 2005. Potassium deficits across 90 percent of the world’s harvested area. Phosphorus across 85 percent. Nitrogen across 59 percent. More than half the cropland on this planet is mining its own fertility, taking more out each season than goes back in.Now, although I was originally a carpenter and a farm hand, I am now a scientist and a physician, and I want to be fair to the other side, because there is a real objection here.A Canadian researcher named Robin Marles published a systematic review in 2017 arguing that these historical comparisons are unreliable. Analytical methods changed between 1950 and 1999. Crop varieties changed. Samples came from different regions and different laboratories. His conclusion was that claims of soil depletion driving nutritional decline are unfounded.He is right about the methods. Comparing a 1950 assay to a 1999 assay is not clean science.But he is measuring the wrong thing. Total mineral content in soil is not the same as biological availability to a plant. A field can test perfectly adequate for zinc on paper and still fail to deliver zinc, because the fungal networks that shuttle micronutrients into roots have been suppressed.That is not a hypothesis. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi have partnered with plant roots for more than four hundred million years. They colonize the root and extend hyphae out into the soil, sometimes multiplying a plant’s effective root area by a hundred. In exchange for sugars from the plant, they deliver phosphorus, zinc, selenium, and iodine that the roots could never reach on their own.Deep tillage shreds those networks. Heavy phosphorus fertilization suppresses them. Pesticides reduce microbial diversity. Monoculture starves the whole community of the botanical diversity it feeds on.So as a consequence, you end up with soil that still grows a crop but has lost its biological intelligence.The evidence that fixing it worksThe strongest evidence comes from David Montgomery and colleagues at the University of Washington, published in PeerJ in 2022.They found paired farms across this country. Same crops. Same soil type. Fields side by side. One managed conventionally, one managed regeneratively for five to ten years with no till, cover crops, and diverse rotation.In one wheat comparison in Oregon, the cover cropped grain came in with 41 percent more boron, 48 percent more calcium, 56 percent more zinc, and four times the molybdenum of the conventional field immediately next door.Here is the part that matters most. Those nutrient differences did not track with total soil mineral levels. They tracked with soil health scores. Organic matter, microbial activity, aggregate structure. The regenerative soils were not chemically richer at a gross level. The fungi and the microbes had gone back to work making them richer at a micro and nano level.How long it takesEvery farmer asks me the same question, and most speakers dodge it. So here is the honest answer.In the first six to twelve months, microbial activity rebounds and earthworm populations climb. Your soil smells earthier. It crumbles instead of clodding. Those are not cosmetic changes.Over one to three years, labile carbon builds and early mycorrhizal networks establish. Water infiltration improves, and your cover crops come up more vigorously each season.The five-to-ten-year window is where the payoff shows up in the food. That is the range where Montgomery documented measurable improvement in crop micronutrient density.Past ten to twenty years, topsoil deepens. The University of Washington farm study measured topsoil thickness increasing fourfold over twenty years on ground that had been a garbage dump.I owe you the bad news with it. Yields dip in the transition, usually for one to three years, while soil biology reorganizes and weed pressure rises. Rodale’s Farming Systems Trial found organic yields back to conventional levels within three to five years. Insect pressure also goes up, and you (or your chickens) will manage that issue for as long as you farm.The asymmetry is what should motivate you. Degradation under intensive conventional management runs somewhere between a hundred and a thousand times faster than passive recovery. Land does not heal on its own at any speed worth waiting for. It heals when somebody decides to heal it.What that food does inside a bodyNow let me put on the other hat. My medical doctor side.We talk about obesity as a weight problem. It is more accurate to call it a chronic low grade inflammatory disease.White adipose tissue is not inert storage. It is an active endocrine and immune organ. It responds to hormonal signals, and it manufactures cytokines that reach every system in your body. As that tissue expands it becomes dysregulated and inflamed, and that inflammation drives insulin resistance and impaired glucose metabolism.The relationship runs both directions. Metabolic dysfunction promotes inflammation, and inflammation further wrecks metabolic control. Patients get caught in that loop and are then told to eat less and move more.Adipose tissue also produces leptin, which is supposed to tell your brain you have enough stored energy and can stop eating. In obesity many people become leptin resistant. Levels are high and the brain no longer listens. Hunger persists. Then we call this signaling biochemistry a failure of willpower.There is more. Visceral fat drives testosterone down in men, partly through inflammatory signaling and partly through increased conversion of testosterone to estrogen. It is often reversible with abdominal fat loss.And this compounds with age. The literature calls it inflammaging. Low grade systemic inflammation climbing year over year, associated with cardiovascular disease, neurodegeneration, frailty, and joint degeneration.Walk through any airport and you can watch it. Altered gait, visible discomfort, limited mobility. Pain limits movement, less movement raises inflammation, and inflammation worsens the pain.The food that feeds itThe observational literature linking ultra-processed food to bad outcomes is large, and I will not rely on it, because you can always argue confounding.The controlled feeding trials are harder to dismiss. Match the macronutrients. Vary only the degree of processing. The people on the ultra-processed diet eat more calories and gain more weight. The structure of the food, not just its nutrient composition, is changing appetite regulation.Take breakfast cereal, since it sits in most American kitchens.Children’s cereals average about 34 percent sugar by weight. Some run 50 to 56 percent. A child eating one bowl a day consumes roughly ten pounds of sugar a year from that one habit.Much of it arrives as high fructose corn syrup, enzymatically converted to be sweeter and more palatable. The oils are extracted with high heat and hexane, then degummed, bleached, and deodorized. The preservatives include BHT, which the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies as a possible human carcinogen. The dyes include Red 40 and Yellow 5, restricted or warning labeled in parts of Europe over behavioral effects in children.Americans bought thirteen billion dollars of that in 2024.We took the bran and germ out of the grain, then fortified the starch with synthetic vitamins and printed heart healthy on the box.Why this happenedThis was not an accident of the market. It was policy.Earl Butz ran USDA under Nixon and Ford. His key policy phrase was get big or get out. Federal policy restructured around scale, specialization, and volume. Price supports gave way to payments tied to production, and those payments favored large operations.It worked exactly as designed. Production rose, food got cheap, and the diversified family farm lost the economic ground it needed to survive.When Jill and I bought our place in Madison County, we bought the end of that story. Productive farm land used for dairy and hogs, then monoculture hay, then depletion, then abandonment. Collapsed buildings and compacted clay.The people before us did not fail for lack of effort or skill. They failed because the economics of twentieth century farm policy left an operation that size no room to stand. I did not fully understand that when I signed. I understand it now.2022I want to tell you what changed for us, and I want to be careful about what it proves.In 2022 Jill and I were both in poor metabolic health. Technically obese. I was dealing with cardiac arrhythmia, chronic digestive problems, and the aftermath of COVID illness and vaccine injury. Jill was managing nerve damage from a trimalleolar fracture and recovering from facial reconstruction after a horse injury.We had been vegetarians for more than thirty years. We were certain we ate well. Our blood work said otherwise.My physician, Brooke Miller, looked at those numbers and was blunt with me. Eat meat. Prioritize protein. Get rid of the processed carbohydrate that had colonized our diet over three decades.We spent a month reading before we changed anything. Then we changed everything. Our own eggs, grass fed meat, raw milk from our Jersey herd, garden vegetables, organic grain we mill ourselves. No seed oils, no added sugar, no refined flour, no processed food. We added intermittent fasting and cut total calories.We each lost fifty pounds inside a year. Years later, neither of us has put it back. The arthritic symptoms that had been closing in on both of us largely resolved. My digestive trouble is gone.Two people is not a study. Our experience proves nothing at a population level, and I will not pretend otherwise.I tell you because I want to be concrete about what it feels like when the food comes off your own ground. The farm did not just supply ingredients. It supplied the framework. You stop eating passively.What this does not fixI also want to be honest about the limits, because overclaiming is how movements lose credibility.Homesteading does not fix the subsidy structures that reward commodity monoculture. It does not compel EPA to finish a glyphosate risk assessment that takes independent science seriously. It does not reduce the political weight of agribusiness lobbying in Washington. It does not rebuild the large animal veterinary infrastructure we let collapse over fifty years, and it does not undo the regulatory capture that makes it harder every year for a small farm to sell directly to its neighbors.Those are political problems. They need political work, and anyone who tells you a garden solves them is grifting, and you are the mark.What it does resolveWhat homesteading resolves is your household’s exposure to the worst of what that system produces.Grow vegetables in living soil without chemical inputs and you are eating measurably more nutrient dense food than the supermarket sells. Keep your own hens and your eggs are nutritionally superior to anything in a grocery case. Keep a dairy animal on good pasture and what you drink is a biologically different product than the commodity that has been homogenized, pasteurized, and hauled across a continent.It resolves one more thing that does not appear in any assay. Agency.The modern food system runs on consumer ignorance. It works best when nobody asks what is in the bag or what was sprayed on it. The morning you start growing your own food, that ignorance stops being available to you. You know what went into your soil. You know what your animals ate.And every version of this counts. The person in an apartment who trades cereal for eggs and grows herbs on a windowsill has moved the needle. The suburban family with a raised bed and three chickens has moved it further. The family that finds five acres and builds living soil has moved it further still. None of them had to wait for anyone else, or for Washington DC, to solve the larger problem first.Jill and I started with working her father’s lemon and avocado farm, and then two chickens named Henny and Penny in married student housing in La Jolla. Our son Zach is forty-two now and he still remembers those hens. Every farm since grew out of that.CloseHealth is not merely biochemical. It is cultural. Food is not merely fuel. It is sovereignty. Farming is not merely an industry. It is an inheritance.Freedom is not secured in distant institutions. It is practiced at home.Plant something. Raise something. Cook something. Know where it came from.Cultivate your garden. The rest will follow.Jill received this Facebook DM from Haris Lender, one of the many friends we met at this year’s Polyface retreat.“On December 31, 2021, Dr. Robert Malone appeared on the Joe Rogan experience. For those of you that don’t know, he helped to develop the MRNA platform and DOESN’T support the Cvid vax. Let that sink in.Immediately afterwards Neil  (f**k the man/gov) Young decided that he was sticking with the Gov and if Joe Rogan wasn’t taken off Spotify for having Dr. Robert Malone on his show for speaking the truth about the Cvd Quacksenes…  he would leave.So much for free speech eh?Spotify stuck with Joe. Good choice IMHO.Right afterwards I made a post. I mocked Neil who I have always loved… but was disappointed in his behavior.My post:“Hey hey … my my… Neil Young’s off Spotify!”That was the beginning of the cancellation of ME.I got a lot of flack for that.Lost a lot of friends and FB followers and my life has never quite been the same.Of course not nearly as bad as for Dr. Robert Malone, who I still stand by, for speaking the truth. Six years later, I finally feel it has all been a blessing for waking me up and making me a stronger person.He is one of my many heros in the long battle for Cvd truthers. Dr. Malone’s wife Jill is also quite the force to be reckoned with and somehow we have become FB friendly. Thanks for your support Jill!Being here in Staunton, VA at the Brownstone organization medical freedom conference with all of these phenomenal Doctors, Scientists and medical freedom fighters is incredibly exciting. Our Government should never have the right to mandate an experimental Quacksene. Period!Thank you Dr. Malone for fighting for us and even though it has been a challenging journey…  the future sure does look bright!So here we are almost six years after the post that ended my life as I know it and this time I’m gonna say:“Hey hey my my… it’s Robert and Jill Malone… and me oh my!”Today was a good day.”Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Jeffrey TuckerJoel Salatin, a national treasure

Summary: Robert W. Malone, MD, MS Brownstone Institute at Polyface Farm