Killing Kids is a MAHA Way of Life

Lessons from places where they actually report the deaths

Author

mister mix
February 09, 2026

Measles is a scary disease:

On February 20, 2025, the Chihuahua Health Department reported a case of measles in a 9-year-old boy from a Mennonite community in the municipality of Cuauhtémoc who had traveled to Seminole, Texas, a settlement where measles cases had already occurred with one known death at the time of the visit.

[…]

This week, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) confirmed that Mexico leads the Americas in COVID-19 measles [ed.] infections, with 6,428 cases and 24 deaths. Of that total, Chihuahua accounts for 4,495 cases and 21 deaths; followed by Jalisco, with 1,034 cases and one death; Chiapas, with 432 cases; Michoacán, with 261; and Guerrero, with 257.

Of the total infections, 275 were imported, 4,054 were related to importation, and 2,839 remain with the source of infection under study.

The report in the American Journal of Epidemiology highlights that 10 of the deaths occurred among Indigenous communities in Chihuahua, where 569 cases were recorded. Three deaths were recorded in the rest of the population, in addition to the death of a Wixárika child from Nayarit.

“The Rarámuri indigenous population of Chihuahua had a mortality rate 18 times higher than the rest of the population, and this excess was statistically significant,” the study notes. The age distribution shows especially high rates in children under six months and in infants aged six to 11 months, with levels 41.4 and 82.5 times higher, respectively, than those observed in people aged 50 and over. The second most affected group was the 20-39 age group.

[…]

The conclusion is stark: measles did not return due to vaccine ineffectiveness, but rather due to the accumulated neglect of entire communities. Without targeted campaigns, strengthened molecular surveillance, and specific strategies for mobile, Indigenous, and rural populations, Mexico will remain vulnerable to new outbreaks. This major setback in nearly three decades offers an uncomfortable lesson: measles elimination is not lost overnight; it erodes slowly.

I picked this report because Mexico still has a functioning public health system, so, unlike us, Mexicans know how many of their children have been infected and killed. This report is based on work by researchers from the University of Guadalajara with contributions from two other universities.

This is related, I’ll explain:

I was looking for something in my dad’s basement and I came across this textbook (the old man “collects” this stuff). It’s over 300 pages long and was printed in 1939. That’s just one book, about one relatively small topic in medicine, that I’m sure would be thousands of pages long almost a hundred years later. But if you’re someone like RFK Jr, who thinks he knows everything, the vast corpus of medical knowledge is so far beyond his ability to understand it, that his ego requires that he find explanations for difficult diseases that are simple, concise and wrong. This small-minded anti-science attitude is what led to the deaths of children in Mexico, from a case that came from Los Estados Unidos, a nation that’s given so much to Mexico over the years.

Speaking of small minds, the UK’s attitude towards trans kids is a killer:

For years, successive governments have denied an increase in suicides among trans youth following the withdrawal, and criminalisation, of gender affirming healthcare. And, when Good Law Project raised the alarm about rising deaths, health secretary Wes Streeting responded with a review that criticised our figures and attacked our reporting as “dangerous”.

[…]

Now, Good Law Project can confirm that in 2021-2022 suicides of trans children in England surged to 22, a marked increase from 5 and 4 the previous two years. This spike follows the decision by NHS England to pull down the shutters on gender affirming healthcare for young trans people following detransitioner Keira Bell’s case against the Tavistock. The judgment was overturned, and heavily criticised, in the Court of Appeal following an intervention by Good Law Project. But, under heavy political pressure from the Conservatives and now Streeting, NHS England never again raised the shutters.

Good Law Project via Erin Reed

Here’s a backgrounder on the Tavistock closure.

The reason we need to get government out of the treatment of trans kids is to save lives. So, I have to send a thank you to AIPAC for opening the door for this woman to get a seat in Congress:

I’m Analilia Mejia and I approve this message.

— Analilia Mejia for New Jersey (@analiliafornj.bsky.social)2026-02-08T20:33:22.979Z

Trans kids healthcare is lifesaving medicine, and we need more members of the Democratic Party to advocate for it, rather than getting hung up on trans kids in sports.

The good news in all this, if there is any, is that this guy is in charge of public health in Mexico, an 83 year-old MD/PhD with hundreds of publications, a specialist in liver disease who’s trained most of the liver specialists in Mexico. In other words, he’s everything that RFK Jr. is not:

In response to the resurgence of measles outbreaks in various countries across the continent and in some states within the country, Health Secretary David Kershenobich announced that Mexico has joined an extraordinary two-month period to contain the disease.

[…]

He specified that 13,872,220 doses were distributed in 2025, while 3,836,530 vaccines have been distributed so far in 2026. These figures are in addition to the acquisition of 10.8 million doses in 2024 and 27,365,000 vaccines purchased in 2025, which, he emphasized, guarantees the supply to continue with the national immunization strategy.

[…]

Kershenobich Stalnikowitz explained that the health sector maintains three key vaccination moments:

1. The application for newborn girls and boys

2. The second dose

3. A third recovery dose aimed at people who had not been previously immunized

In addition, he indicated that the priority groups include children aged one year and 18 months, the lagging population aged 2 to 9 years, health personnel, educational personnel, agricultural day laborers and, in an extraordinary way, the application of a zero dose to children aged 6 to 11 months, as a preventive measure during the outbreak.

Imagine if we had this kind of program in the US.

Imagine if, instead of treating trans kids like some form of vermin, we let parents and physicians work to give those few who need it gender-affirming care.

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