Hey, everyone, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bullwark.

I'm here with Jonathan Cohn, author of The Breakdown.

If you want to be depressed about the state of health in this country, that's the newsletter for you, folks. Subscribe. Never an uplifting version. Always a disaster. It's just what you want. John, thanks for doing this. Appreciate it. You wrote about the measles epidemic, which, you know, it's kind of been at this like slow burn a little bit in the backdrop of our politics. But it's become a real issue, obviously, in South Carolina predominantly, but not just South Carolina. We had this new story over the weekend about an ice facility that has its own measles outbreak.

I want to put up a graph that shows just how bad 2026 is shaping up to be.

You can see it there as we talk compared to 2025, which was already bad.

And then I'm just going to ask you exactly how bad is it? It's pretty bad. I know, I know we're not bringing to sunshine here, but I mean, the measles is back. I mean, that's really bad. I mean, it's bad and it's stupid. I mean, we have a vaccine. You know, we used it. Measles was a part of life once upon a time. It circulated. You know, a lot of people think, oh, measles, you know, not so big a deal. You get some rash. You know, you may remember the Brady Bunch episode if you're old enough from the, you know, in 1969 where the whole family got it. And, you know, most people who get it will be okay after a week or damn. It's not, it's not like an get the high fever and everything, but most people get over, but some people don't. You know, I mean, you can get blindness. You can get pneumonia, swine the brain. You know, hundreds of people used to die every year from the measles. And then we got a vaccine. Woo, you know, we got the vaccine. Pretty much wiped it out. And you would have cases in this country, but they were always, you know, from someone

would go abroad and bring it back because, you know, we random, you know, somebody who wasn't

vaccinated.

And since most people were vaccinated, we had a herd immunity and it didn't spread.

Well, now it's spreading.

And, you know, we got, last year we had the, the Texas outbreak, which was big.

And three people died, including two children. That hadn't happened in 10 years. And, you know,

children dying from a preventable, when they didn't have to is, is really awful. I mean,

that should not happen. And of course, many more got hospitalized. And now we got this outbreak in South Carolina.

It's getting bigger.

I mean, they're logging 100 cases a week.

Now they're seeing it over the border in North Carolina.

There's cases, other parts of the country.

And we don't know which are connected to which yet.

But this shouldn't be happening.

From your reporting, do you get a sense of how the government is monitoring and trying

to contain this? So it's weird. You know, first of all, the front line is always the states,

...