- David Wallace-Wells on the real reason MAGA hates vaccines;
- How ICE is about retribution against those who didn’t vote for Trump;
- How the title of a recent book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” applies to the current situation;
- Conservative lunatics on “gay beam” airport scanners, and demons;
- Conservatives obsessed with overturning marriage equality, because intuitions;
- George Packer on the need for a mass movement for basic decency.
NY Times, opinion by David Wallace-Wells, 28 Jan 2026: The Real Reason MAHA Hates Vaccines
Stated right up front.
What is the war on vaccines really about? Just after the New Year, like someone racing to fulfill a resolution, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA alliance at the Department of Health and Human Services released a radically revised federal vaccine schedule, bypassing the usual procedures and abruptly cutting the number of diseases for which shots are recommended from 17 to 11.
The new guidelines certainly look like the frontal assault on vaccine science many Americans have been fearing for a year. But a different way to think about it is this: as another attack on the country’s threadbare social safety net by health libertarians whose strategy for making America healthy again appears straightforwardly to mean letting more of the country’s weak and vulnerable suffer and die.
