| This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, an unpredictable geopolitical storm of Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here. As if the world couldn't get any more bleak, today Texas announced the first death in the ongoing measles outbreak: a school-aged child who was not vaccinated. One can't help but feel this young person's life might have been spared if our secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services took the science behind the disease seriously, but alas ... [1]  Lisa Jarvis says the outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico, which has sickened more than 130 people, is "an entirely avoidable health emergency fueled by weaknesses in our vaccine forcefield." With RFK Jr. steering the ship, we can expect things to get even worse. "Kennedy has spent years railing against the safety of the MMR vaccine (and falsely connecting it to autism) and now has the power to act on his beliefs," she writes. When asked about the child's death, Kennedy told reporters, "It's not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year." Yet we've gone a decade without one turning deadly — this is the first measles fatality since 2015. "Although Texas' childhood vaccination rate is just over 94%, its outbreak started in Gaines County, where some 18% of kindergarteners have vaccine exemptions," Lisa writes. While some families abstain from immunizations for religious reasons, Kennedy's anti-vax rhetoric makes the situation all the more dire. It's hard to overstate how easy it is to contract measles. "After someone with measles coughs or sneezes — or even breathes — tiny droplets of the virus hang in the air like ghosts for up to two hours, waiting to infect anyone who wanders by," Lisa writes. And in kindergarten?! There's snot everywhere. The playground. The box of crayons. The story time rug. If you think the flu or Covid or hand, foot and mouth disease spread like wildfire, you're in for a rude awakening: measles trumps them all in terms of contagiousness. Even Ebola. The outbreak is just one instance where Republicans are failing the voting bloc they claim to value the most: families. In an era when President Donald Trump is focused on slashing funding and firing federal workers, Kathryn Anne Edwards says the party is loath to fix another issue that besets parents: the child care crisis. "Privately provided care is completely immune to market solutions," she writes. "No innovation, no returns to scale, no miracle of supply chains and no leap in artificial intelligence will make it more plentiful or more affordable. As long as it is sold in a market, child care will only decline." Kathryn's solution? "A federal government takeover that replaces the private sale of care with a public provision, either through reimbursement or direct delivery." Her rationale is purely economic. "Child care is less reliable than it used to be for working parents," she writes. Post-Covid, more people are choosing not to clock in because their kid lacks proper care: It'd be neat if Trump could use his $5 million "gold cards" to fund a system that functions properly, but I highly doubt that will happen. Many Republicans would prefer to solve the issue through deregulation. "Their ideas include letting children as young as 14 monitor other children, increasing the allowable ratios between children and monitors, and requiring less training, including safety," Kathryn explains. Increasing capacity on the daycare roster?? Something tells me we shouldn't try adding more runny noses into the mix at a time when measles is hospitalizing kids, but hey, I'm no health expert.  | | | A bunch of people on the internet — including myself — recently learned that the Pentagon building contains as many fast food restaurants as a small regional airport. Someone named "Silly Stu" made an entire song about it, aptly called, "McDonald's in the Pentagon." Although I can't fathom making coherent decisions about defense weaponry on a stomach of McDouble and fries, everyone's gotta eat! Even the people who have the nuclear codes, I guess.  But those fast food restaurants might not be getting as much business, what with Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth thinning the military ranks. James Stavridis says two members of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff — the chairman, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Lisa Franchetti — were fired without rationale, along with Air Force's vice chief of staff, General James Slife, and three judge advocate generals (JAGS) — the top uniformed lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force. "Looking at the mass firings overall, I am struck by how this will hurt US security in three serious ways. First, at the tactical level, it will create real disruption," he writes. It will also "inject politics into the military" and "will be a discouraging time in the senior levels of the military." Internationally, this disfunction will be met with glee by Russia and China and disgust by Europe. "It feels like we are living through a looking glass moment, a world turned on its head," Karishma Vaswani writes. "The US has upended decades of stable foreign policy." Smaller countries with meager defense budgets that were once shielded under America's protectionist umbrella have been suddenly thrust into an unpredictable geopolitical storm:  Across the Atlantic, Lionel Laurent says, "calls for deeper European integration in defense are getting more strident as US President Donald Trump threatens to throw his allies under the bus over Ukraine three years after Russia's invasion." Germany's new center-right leader, Friedrich Merz, is leading the charge, calling for defense "independence" from the US — the kind of rhetoric you'd hear back in the days of Charles de Gaulle. "Breaking the taboo of Germany's frugal attitude to spending and its NATO-first security policy will be hard, as will attempts to fix the sorry state of the country's armed forces. Yet it will be a big signal to Paris that it's time to think the unthinkable on topics such as investing in and sharing France's nuclear deterrent," he writes. Perhaps Macron and Merz can strike a deal over a McBaguette. |
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