Four percent of the cases had both shots. Nobody said that part out loud on television, and I would like to know why I had to go find it myself.
They spent Friday reading the same sentence at me from every channel. Worst measles record in thirty-five years. Then they moved on to weather, and not one of them stayed on the screen long enough to read the rest of the table.
So I read it.
What the Measles Record Actually Breaks Down To
Of the 2,318 cases the government has logged this year, four percent were people who had received both doses. Another three percent had one. Do that multiplication and you are looking at better than a hundred and sixty Americans who did precisely what the poster in the pharmacy told them to do and caught it regardless.
A hundred and sixty people. Let that sink in.
I am not telling anybody what to do with their own family. I have said that in this column for two years and I will say it again here. What I am asking is why a hundred and sixty people is the one figure in that whole table nobody wanted to say into a microphone.
The Ninety-Three Percent
They will come back at me with the big number. Ninety-three percent of the cases were in people who were unvaccinated or whose status nobody wrote down, and this is the second record year running.
Sure. And what does that tell you about the four percent? It tells you the four percent showed up anyway, in a country where almost everybody is vaccinated, which is the part where the argument gets quiet. Go pull the table yourself. It is a government website, it is free, and it took me eleven minutes.
Before the comments fill up with the supplement business: I sell nothing. I have never taken a dollar from a vitamin outfit. The only supplement in this house is the fish oil Denise buys on Thursdays, and anybody who wants to follow the money here can start with whoever manufactures the shot and work outward.
What the Measles Record Does Not Tell You
Our homestead editor went through the same agency’s lab work on that lettuce and found the evidence had been quietly walked back. Same office. Same week. Nobody covered that either.
Denise pointed out over dinner that I had every one of those shots myself in 1974, and that I have never had the measles, and she said it in the tone she uses when she believes she has finished a conversation. I told her that is one data point out of 340 million and I would not dream of building a national policy on it.
That is the whole trouble with how this country reads a table now. Everybody stops at the line that agrees with them. I go all the way to the bottom, every time, including the rows nobody wants read aloud. That is called scrutiny. And I’m full of it.
About the Author
