Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency for the new Spectator USA website.

I'm joined today by Barbara Boland, who is a journalist based in Washington, and a new contributor to Spectator USA.

She's just written a piece about the outbreak of measles in America.

Now, Barbara, this is quite surprising.

I mean, measles had seemingly been conquered in 2000 in America, and it's quite unusual in a developed country for diseases to reemerge like this.

Why do you think it is?

You know, it's interesting. You have this confluence of events. There was a big push in the late

2000s, around 2013, by an actress, Jenny McCarthy, where she was sort of connecting

autism with the MMR vaccine.

And part of the reason that she did that was based on a study, which has been discredited.

But the movement really took off with a lot of moms, a lot of internet research that was

happening. A lot of people saying, well, we've had all these people getting diagnosed with

autism. We didn't have that 10 years ago. Why are we seeing that? And we're also, coincidentally,

now vaccinating everyone with MMR.

What people didn't seem to grasp was those two things aren't necessarily connected. And they didn't also understand that people used to actually die from measles with, you know, in the 60s and 70s, even up until the 80s,

there were two and a half million children dying for measles in the U.S.

Instead, they said measles was not really that bad.

And do you know anybody who died from measles?

They said stuff like this.

And it's like, well, we don't know people

who died from measles anymore because of herd immunity, because so many people had been vaccinated,

we'd almost, well, we had wiped it out in 2000. But and also, I mean, there was the academic

...