The Rachel Maddow Show
As measles outbreak turns deadly, RFK Jr. gets the facts wrong
Thu, 27 Feb 2025
The measles outbreak in Texas continues to grow and has now claimed the life of an unvaccinated child. In Washington, D.C., at a Cabinet meeting apparently assembled for TV cameras, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s statements about the outbreak were distressingly erroneous.
What historical diseases are discussed in this episode?
You know, at a time when our country is so divided, at a time when there is very little on which Americans agree at all, even in terms of just the basic facts of life, at a time when it seems like it is impossible to generalize at all about a thing being bad or a thing being good. Can we all agree? I hereby posit, can we all agree, that one thing that's bad is the bubonic plague?
Now, admit it, you thought I was going to say Nazis there, didn't you? I know, I know. But we're now at the point in U.S. politics where that can no longer be the go-to example for thing we all agree is bad. So I'm going to try to reset a new baseline for us here in 2025 in the United States of America.
Is there anyone out there who does not agree or who doesn't get that the bubonic plague is a bad thing? The bubonic plague has its own era in human history, the Black Death years. There was an eight-year period in the later part of the Middle Ages, in the 1300s, when bubonic plague ripped through Europe. It killed two-thirds of the entire human population of Europe in eight years.
It killed 25 million people. Bubonic plague is an infectious disease that kills you quickly. You get it from a bacteria that is carried by rodents. They call it the black death because you get huge swollen lymph nodes and then you start turning black from gangrene. I mean, literally, it's the worst thing in the world. It's the worst plague to have ever afflicted humankind in all of human history.
And you can still get it. You can still get it the same way people got it during the 1300s in the Black Death years. You get it by contact with rodents that are carrying this particular bacterium. It's not common for people to get bubonic plague anymore, but it does happen, particularly in a few specific spots in the world.
So over the last few years, for example, you might have occasionally seen, you know, alarming headlines like this one. A couple ate raw marmot believed to have health benefits. Then they died of the plague. Or this one, as bubonic plague kills another man in Mongolia, Russia starts mass vaccination against black death.
Or this one from roughly around the same time, quote, Russia cracks down on marmot hunting after bubonic plague alert. And actually, I should mention, all those stories had to do with Mongolia, specifically with people getting bubonic plague because of contact with marmots In Mongolia, marmots are basically big squirrels. They look like groundhogs. They're very cute, but they're big squirrels.
And sadly, they are among the rodent species that can carry the bubonic plague. In fact, in some marmot populations in some parts of Asia, bubonic plague is endemic. It's really widespread in the population of those animals.
So after incidents like these ones in 2019 and 2020 that occasioned those headlines that I just showed you, Mongolia had like a dozen suspected cases of bubonic plague and people had started dying.
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