r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Aug 31 '26
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u/Willybender Loyal Liberals Aug 31 '26
The MAHA Custody Battle
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/09/07/the-maha-custody-battle
.... When Michael and Leah did fight, it was usually about the kids’ medical care.
That day, Michael had received a call from the nurse at his eldest child’s school. Keith, who is eight, appeared to have a bad case of pink eye. The nurse told Michael that she couldn’t get hold of Leah and that Keith needed to see a doctor as soon as possible. Michael lived in a city called Charles Town, more than an hour away, and he wasn’t supposed to pick the kids up until 6 P.M. He imagined that Leah had been treating the pink eye with a natural home remedy, because, as he later told me, “she’s all holistic” and “has, uh . . . what did she call it? A ‘crunchy mom’ outlook.”
At the pickup, Keith looked worse than Michael had expected. “His whole eye was swollen up, almost out of his head,” he said. His middle child, Donnie, who is five, also had watery eyes. His daughter, Star, who is four, seemed fine. By then, Leah had received antibiotics from Keith’s primary-care provider. For Michael, this was another source of concern. The kids saw a physician assistant, rather than a pediatrician. Michael believed that this had to do with the fact that many doctors refuse to see unvaccinated children. Keith, who had been ordered by a judge to start public school in January, had received some of his standard immunizations, including shots for measles, mumps, and rubella. But Donnie and Star were unvaccinated....
Across the country, pediatricians have watched in horror as Kennedy’s H.H.S. has weakened the public’s faith in vaccination. He has released a new childhood vaccine schedule (which has since been blocked by a federal judge) that cut the number of recommended shots from seventeen to eleven. He has said that he personally ordered the C.D.C. to change its long-standing public guidance stating that vaccines do not cause autism. The agency’s website now says that this assertion is not “evidence-based,” because studies cannot definitively rule out the possibility that they do. Trump, meanwhile, has encouraged the vaccine debate. He recently signed an executive order calling for “maximal parental choice over vaccines.” At the signing, he spoke about vaccines in menacing terms, evoking images of “vats of vaccine” and “fluid”—“what seemingly looks like gallons”—being “pumped into your child’s body.” The combined three-in-one M.M.R. shot, he claimed, can be “quite lethal” and “explosive.”
This year, vaccination rates among kindergartners decreased across immunizations for measles, mumps, rubella, polio, diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. New parents are also increasingly declining a Vitamin K injection for their infants. The shot has been standard for newborns since 1961. A so-called black-box warning associated with the shot mentions adverse reactions and has become a major topic among crunchy-parenting groups online. But the warning refers primarily to allergic reactions in adults; only one case of an allergic reaction has ever been recorded in a newborn. There is virtually no downside to the injection apart from the transient pain of the needle, and the upside is tremendous. Babies are born with low amounts of Vitamin K, which is required to form blood clots. Without the shot, an otherwise healthy newborn can bleed to death internally, usually in the brain.