The big read in the venerable New Yorker magazine this week is a profile of West Virginian parents, Michael and Leah, and their destructive conflict over vaccinating their children. During the pandemic, Leah emerged from the pits of the TikTok rabbit hole believing that vaccines were dangerous. Michael, who wanted the children vaccinated as normal, watched slack-jawed as the marital relationship slid into open conflict. He felt like he was “living in crazy town”, he told the writer Ruby Cramer. Then the children got sick with suspected measles – and suddenly they were in a custody dispute in the family court.

Cramer uses the family’s fight as a lens on the “Make America Healthy Again” movement (aka Maha), the unhinged, ever-shifting, vaccine-sceptical, research-killing policies of Robert F Kennedy jnr, the man chosen by Donald Trump to guide and protect the health of all Americans. Cramer’s achievement is to show in heartbreaking detail how fringe beliefs migrate into an ordinary family’s life, blow up in parental arguments over basic, proven healthcare and inevitably make their way to the judges of the family courts to adjudicate upon.

Well, you may be thinking, isn’t that the essence of Trumpian America. Think again.

In a Dublin District Family Court hearing last Friday, a woman sought an emergency protection order against her husband. It was a decision that had been a long time........

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