The shocking collapse of American vaccination

A somewhat surprising, totally terrible, borderline unfixable Trump legacy

Anti-vaccine protesters gather to demonstrate in Albany, N.Y. (Photo by Anadolu)

Something that came up very briefly in my chat with Nate Silver is that there’s a difference between being surprised and being shocked.

Surprise is a pure epistemic judgement: “I had forecast that X was very unlikely to happen but then it happened.” Shock is what we in philosophy class called a thick concept, which means that it blends an epistemic judgement with a moral judgement.

And with that in mind, in some respects what I think has been most shocking about Trump’s second term has been the administration’s willful enabling of the ongoing collapse of vaccination in the United States.

Perhaps this isn’t the most surprising thing in the world. Trump assiduously courted R.F.K. Jr.’s support throughout the campaign, so why wouldn’t he put an anti-vaccine crank in charge of American public health?

But nothing in life is as inevitable as all that.