There’s more reason than ever for Louisianans to remind Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy not to let the door hit him on the way out of the Senate after his intemperate remarks made recently about increasing numbers of measles cases in the country and health care policy under GOP Pres. Donald Trump.

At a conference sponsored by a politics website, Cassidy blamed Trump and specifically his appointee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, for the increase, already in annual terms the highest number in over a quarter-century. He said messaging was to blame, as HHS under Kennedy has shifted departmental communications away from unabashed stumping for vaccinations to one of seeking advice from trusted health care providers.

He called this an effort to “undermine faith” in vaccines generally and also claimed to have had his faith undermined by his voting to advance Kennedy’s nomination for the post in early 2025, only to have this rhetoric about vaccination develop. Cassidy lost the Republican primary for reelection this spring in part because Trump backed the likely winner this fall, Republican Rep. Julia Letlow, after Cassidy had flip-flopped to vote to convict Trump on questionable impeachment charges as well as backed large-scale Democrat spending legislation.

Whether he felt it but held it in check prior to the impeachment vote or developed it as a result of a larger political strategy during and after his vote, Cassidy since has displayed a public lapse into Trump Derangement Syndrome, no doubt intensified by his defeat. His commentary on this issue demonstrates that perhaps he needs a vaccination for TDS.

As it is, a Trump surrogate had nothing to do with the increase in measles incidence in the country. Measles cases this century in most years have numbered around a hundred or fewer but began a sharp turn upwards in 2024. Note that infection occurs mostly among unvaccinated people and happens among the unvaccinated years after they passed up opportunities to receive the two-stage vaccine, usually completed around entrance to schooling.

That an upswing would occur when it did is congruent with what happened in the years after 2020, when a several percentage point decline occurred in toddler vaccination rates. This relates to the period of intense lobbying by the federal government, put on steroids by Democrat Pres. Joe Biden, first underselling vaccination to counter the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic because the Trump Administration spearheaded that, then swinging violently in the other direction in overselling it and tying it to unpopular measures such as needless restrictions on personal liberties. This promoted overall skepticism of vaccination generally.

People didn’t become vulnerable overnight because Kennedy took the job. They became vulnerable because of the mendacity and heavy-handedness of the Biden Administration previously.

Note as well that the substantial increases in cases in the last 20 months are largely the consequence of clusters, triggered as often as not by international travel, among people who have reasons that have nothing to do with any government pronouncements about the utility of vaccination. In Utah (and Arizona), incidence spread among Mormon fundamentalist communities averse to vaccination. In Pennsylvania, the same was true among the Amish. In Texas, the outbreak occurred mainly in an isolated and insular Hispanic area. In Florida, cases were concentrated among college students at a traditional Catholic university.

Another data point illustrating that isolated pockets, rather than a nationwide crisis, typify incidence comes from the fact that the reddest states around Louisiana – Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama – all of which average just below the national 92.4 percent measles vaccination rate (95 percent is considered the breakpoint to reduce the virus to triviality), yet have a whopping three cases among them. The “outbreak,” such as it is, is occurring only in isolated pockets for reasons unconnected to recent HHS communications among people already less prone to have been vaccinated.

But when you have TDS, you don’t think analytically. Cassidy has demonstrated, more than once, that his predilection for that long ago compromised his ability to serve adequately in his job, with his latest fulminations only verifying the wisdom of voters tossing him out of office.