Is it a political mistake to kill your voters and their children? That hypothesis will soon be tested.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent mass firing of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is only the latest step in his years-long campaign against vaccination. In the face of a measles outbreak in Texas, he spread misinformation and trumpeted quack remedies. He has canceled vaccine development, cut off research into vaccine hesitancy and joined Elon Musk in massively cutting his agency’s budget and staff.

Kennedy has this power because his support helped elect Trump, and this is his reward.

Democrats ought to hold the Trump administration accountable. Before that can happen, though, the public needs to understand the danger.

Here are the facts about measles, the most contagious of the diseases that Kennedy threatens to bring back to America. You can get it by entering a room where an infected person was two hours earlier. It causes long-term damage to the immune system, leaving children at risk of illness from other diseases for years.

About one child out of every 1,000 who get measles will develop encephalitis (swelling of the brain). This can lead to convulsions and leave the child deaf or with an intellectual disability. Between one and three of every 1,000 children who become infected will die from respiratory and neurologic complications.

Unvaccinated people pose a constant threat, since infants cannot be immunized until they are a year old. In Germany in 2000, an unvaccinated 11-year-old boy was taken to the pediatrician with a fever. He had measles and infected six children in the waiting room, including three babies. Two of them developed an incurable complication called SSPE that usually appears years after the victim seems to have recovered. It produces first cognitive impairment and behavioral problems, then seizures, and finally slow deterioration and death.........

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