Everything they warned us about is happening

**David Pakman** (0:00)
Republicans are making the catastrophic mistake of admitting that the midterms are about Trump as Trump's war drives gas prices above four dollars and approval collapses. Oil is over one hundred bucks. It's a very bad idea. Trump then delivers one of his most incoherent speeches yet, slurring, inventing a health care plan that doesn't exist and saying to Americans crushed by high prices, give me a break.
Democrats should make it a campaign ad. We're also going to look at the administration using dead soldiers to promote the war that got them killed. And we have the anti vaccine politics of RFK bringing measles to a thirty five year high. Mitch McConnell missing more than five weeks. He's probably alive. I don't think that can be the standard for senior senators in Congress. And finally, despite attacks from the White House and the MAGA media machine, this independent show just outranked Fox News and CNN on YouTube. This show, The David Pakman Show, all of it and more today. Glad you're here.
When Donald Trump ran promising numbers, the likes of which we have never seen before. I don't think he meant record measles cases, but that is where we are today. This is a public health emergency and it is happening again. Measles is a disease that the United States kind of defeated more than twenty five years ago. And as I've told you, over the last year or two, it is roaring back. Kids are being hospitalized. And it is all because Donald Trump handed public health to two of America's loudest anti-vax cranks, Trump himself and RFK. Jr. Now, what's fascinating is Trump gets all of his vaccines. Trump's anti-vax is a political tool. Personally, he's like, of course, I'm getting vaccinated. And quite frankly, I don't even know that he believes this crap, but it's politically useful to him. We're only in July and the United States has already recorded almost 2300 measles cases. This is the highest number in 35 years. It has now surpassed last year and it is only July.
Now, of course, more than 90 percent of infections are people who are unvaccinated or have unknown vaccination status. Utah, 90 percent of those hospitalized unvaccinated, most needed IV fluids, more than 60 percent needed oxygen, almost 30 percent got pneumonia because of measles. This is what happens when powerful people poison trust in vaccines. And we have seen this building because even before Donald Trump became president for the second time, we had this sort of vaccine skeptical rhetoric of the end of Trump's first term and continued anti vax rhetoric that grew because President Biden simply oversaw the vaccination distribution program of the covid vaccines. And so it kept building and building. And you've got all of these enclaves that for one reason or another have convinced themselves and others and parents that kids simply don't need to be vaccinated. And in fact, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent decades pushing the debunked idea that maybe vaccines cause autism. Now, should that be investigated? Of course, if vaccines really caused autism, we would want to know. But it's been investigated. And we're working on a deeper dive about this at some point over the next couple of weeks. Donald Trump falsely claimed kids get 80 different vaccines and suggested parents break up the MMR vaccine, even though number one, there's no evidence that that's safer. And number two, you can't get those individual vaccines in the United States. I have a lot of pediatrician friends who say parents come in and they go, listen, I want to vaccinate my kids against measles, mumps and rubella. But let's give them the individual vaccines like Trump suggested. And my pediatrician friends look at the parents and go, those vaccines aren't available in the United States because the MMR is the default. It's safe. It works. We don't have these individual vaccines. Trump then made maybe the most famous vaccines conspiracy theorist, the secretary of Health and Human Services, and RFK loves presenting vaccination like a personal choice. But measles doesn't respect the boundaries of your personal choices because an unvaccinated person can carry measles into a pediatrician's office and expose a six month old baby or a kid getting chemo or someone whose immune system can't respond properly to the vaccine. And those people never chose to assume that risk. They depend on everybody else maintaining community immunity.
One of my pediatrician friends has had four cases of measles, works in a part of the country where this anti-vax stuff is more common. And he's had really wacky conversations with parents where they bring a kid in. And he he asks, is your is in an ER so they don't necessarily have all the medical records? Is your kid vaccinated? And they go, yes, absolutely. OK, hangs out for a bit. They do some initial investigation. My friend goes back to the parents and goes, listen, we suspect that this is measles. You're sure your kid's vaccinated? They go, oh, not against measles. And then now all of a sudden they've got a contact trace. Everybody who was in the waiting room in the ER and might have been exposed. It's a mess.