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Column: Trump and RFK Jr. want to make the world safe again for polio and measles. You should be terrified
What are the chances that the noted anti-vaxxers Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would make common cause to undermine Americans’ health in their pursuit for the presidency?
It didn’t take much hindsight to say the answer is 100%. But there’s no need to speculate any longer — not since this weekend, when Trump and Kennedy both associated themselves with policies that would bring vaccine-preventable diseases such as polio back to the United States.
We’ve already seen that the embrace of pernicious anti-vaccination claptrap by unscrupulous politicians and government officials has had detectable impacts on public health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now reporting 41 cases of measles, for which a vaccine has been available since 1963, in 16 states.
Polio hit without warning. There was no way of telling who would get it….It killed some of its victims and marked others for life, leaving behind vivid reminders for all to see: wheelchairs, crutches, leg braces, breathing devices, deformed limbs.
— David Oshinsky, “Polio: An American Story”
That includes 10 cases in Florida, where public health comes under the jurisdiction of Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, a leading quack and established anti-vaccine activist.
Resistance or refusal of COVID vaccination, plainly due to anti-vaccine propaganda, has kept the vaccine rate alarmingly low.
In only one state, Minnesota, did the percentage of population that has received the latest updated booster exceed 20% as of the end of last year. In Florida, the adult booster rate is an appalling 7.7%. (In California, it’s 14.2%, which isn’t something to be particularly proud about.)
As I’ve reported, as many as 200,000 Americans may have died unvaccinated from COVID since the vaccines were approved in early 2021 — nearly 1 in 5 of the roughly 1.2 million American deaths from the disease. An average of nearly 20,000 Americans a week were hospitalized for COVID during February.
Now let’s take a look at what Trump and Kennedy have been up to. We’ll start with Trump.
At a campaign rally in Richmond, Va., on Feb. 2, he said this, referring to the policy he would implement as president: “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.”
Trump’s words elicited febrile cheers from his Virginia audience, which may be a sign of what I earlier identified as the phenomenon of “herd stupidity” connected with the anti-vaccine movement.
Did these people have any conception of what they were cheering? (We can assume that Trump didn’t.) Did they cotton on to the fact that Trump was advocating depriving all Virginia public and private K-12 schools, nursery schools, child care centers and home schools of federal funding?
We know that would be the consequence of his pledge, because we know that Virginia requires children attending any of those institutions to be vaccinated against 15 diseases, with boosters where appropriate. Virginia’s mandated schedule, like those of every other state, follows the recommendations of the CDC, which calls for some vaccinations within a month or two of birth.
Trump issued his ukase against vaccine mandates right after declaring at the Richmond rally that he would “sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and any other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto our children,” thus covering pretty much the entire right-wing culture battleground, almost all of which is based on manufactured outrage.
In context, Trump’s opposition to vaccine mandates falls into the category of glorifying individual “freedom” over the communal interest. As I’ve written before, opposing vaccine mandates as a substitute for opposing vaccination itself is a fundamentally incoherent position — little more than garden variety small-government Republican ideology almost invariably invoked to protect the interests of the “haves” over the “have-nots.”
What makes it incoherent is that mandates do work. They’ve saved the lives of millions of schoolchildren who would otherwise be exposed to deadly diseases at school and play.
During the COVID pandemic, requirements that people provide evidence of vaccination before attending public events or entering restaurants or bars were associated with heightened vaccine rates abroad. Employer mandates in the U.S. have raised vaccination rates at workplaces, as United Airlines showed.
Now let’s turn to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose campaign for president has allowed his dangerous anti-vaccine hogwash to be mainstreamed into the body politic like an IV drip of strychnine. His pitch so bristles with disinformation and pseudoscience that it’s been disavowed by virtually his entire family, whose name has been synonymous with progressive politics and policy for generations.
Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization Kennedy founded and chairs, last week platformed a fatuously inaccurate 2013 book claiming that polio isn’t caused by a virus and that the polio vaccine “doesn’t work.”
The book was conclusively debunked long ago. But last Tuesday, the organization published an interview with its co-author Suzanne Humphries, in which she repeated her claim that polio is caused by toxins, not the virus.
“According to Humphries, there are no worthwhile vaccines, not even smallpox or tetanus, and certainly not the polio vaccine,” the interview read.
Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine changed history after it was licensed in 1955.
(Associated Press)
One telling factor about this interview is who conducted it: Joseph Mercola, a notorious dispenser of health disinformation who, I reported in 2012, was making millions “from hawking ‘organic’ nostrums and casting doubt on medical science.”
By then, Mercola had attracted regulatory warnings from the Food and Drug Administration on three occasions — twice for marketing what the FDA described as illegal drugs and also for touting thermography as an alternative to mammograms for breast-cancer screening, for which the FDA said it was not effective, and for what the FDA said were other unsupported diagnostic claims.
The FDA warned Mercola again in 2021 for hawking unvalidated nostrums as purported treatments for COVID.
Mercola also appeared on the list of the “Disinformation Dozen” published in 2020 by the Center for Countering Digital Hate — 12 individuals who together accounted for as much as 65% of the anti-vaccine content on social media. Kennedy also appeared on the list.
The truth, of course, is that vaccines work. Polio became a massive threat to public health in the 1940s and 1950s, with a per capita infection rate in the U.S. that reached 87.2 per 100,000 population in 1952, sending tens of thousands of children to the hospital and killing a half-million people per year worldwide during those decades.
Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine underwent a massive trial involving 1.6 million children in the U.S., Canada and Finland in 1954; the vaccine was licensed in 1955.
Salk became an international hero, the more so because he refused to patent the vaccine or profit from its distribution. In 1952 the U.S. had 79,000 polio cases, including 21,300 that led to paralysis, and 3,145 deaths. By 1960 the cases had declined to 2,525 with only 230 deaths. In modern times polio cases have all but disappeared — thanks to vaccination.
The same phenomenon occurred with measles. In 1958, the U.S. saw 763,000 cases and 552 deaths. By 1968, a few years after the vaccine became available, there were 22,231 cases and 24 deaths.
Thanks to immunization mandates, even the most recent spike in cases — triggered by an unvaccinated visitor to Disneyland in 2019 — reached only 1,274 cases.
What makes anti-vaccine propaganda so insidious is that it exploits public inattention. Vaccines have something in common with baseball umpires and football referees — when they do their jobs right, they become almost invisible.
“Vaccines are a victim of their own success,” the eminent vaccine expert Paul Offit told me last year. “When vaccines work, nothing happens.”
The best testament to the success of vaccines may be the disappearance of vaccine-preventable diseases from the everyday concerns of families, especially those with children. Smallpox has been eradicated from the face of the Earth. No one in developed countries has had reason to fear measles, whooping cough, diphtheria or polio for decades.
That also means that the public has forgotten what made some of these diseases so fearsome.
Measles has been reduced in public estimation to a nuisance fever. But it’s an exceptionally dangerous and contagious disease that can explode in communities in which the vaccination rate falls below 95% — whether because of complacency or due to the long-refuted and fraudulent claim that the MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine causes autism.
At the Florida public school that has become the epicenter of that state’s outbreak, the vaccination rate was lower than 90%.
Those whose memories or historical knowledge don’t go back to the mid-20th century may need reminding that polio was a uniquely devastating disease in the 1940s and 1950s.
“No disease drew as much attention, or struck the same terror,” medical historian David Oshinsky wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 book about the period. “And for good reason. Polio hit without warning. There was no way of telling who would get it and who would be spared. It killed some of its victims and marked others for life, leaving behind vivid reminders for all to see: wheelchairs, crutches, leg braces, breathing devices, deformed limbs.”
Philip Roth, in his harrowing 2010 novel “Nemesis,” gave a street-level view of how the disease upended daily life in his native Newark, N.J., during the years when no one knew how it was transmitted and there was no vaccine:
“We were warned not to use public toilets or public drinking fountains or to swig a drink out of someone else’s soda-pop bottle or to get a chill or to play with strangers or to borrow books from the public library or to talk on a public pay phone or to buy food from a street vendor…. We were to keep our distance from anyone who looked sick or complained of any of polio’s telltale symptoms.”
That should underscore the indescribable folly of the anti-vaccine campaigning by Trump and Kennedy. They’re playing with fire, and it’s American families and their children who will be burned. Their efforts to make the world safe again for measles and polio should terrify you.
The Minions took over theaters this weekend as Universal Pictures and Illumination’s “Minions & Monsters” won the top spot at the box office, though with a lower-than-expected domestic haul.
The animated movie, which follows the Minions’ takeover of Hollywood, took in $61.4 million in the U.S. and Canada for the five-day Fourth of July holiday weekend, according to studio estimates. That haul was lower than analysts’ expectations for a domestic opening of about $68 million. The movie’s three-day total was $36.4 million.
But the Minions performed well internationally, bringing in about $85 million. In total, “Minions & Monsters” made $159.9 million worldwide on a production budget of about $85 million.
The film is the latest in the powerhouse franchise that began with “Despicable Me” in 2010. Across its previous six installments, the “Despicable Me” and “Minions” franchise has made more than $5.6 billion at the global box office. The last movie, 2022’s “Minions: The Rise of Gru,” made more than $940 million worldwide.
“Minions & Monsters” marks the lowest opening for the franchise. Part of the issue could be timing — the box office can be negatively affected when the Fourth of July lands on a Saturday, said Paul Dergarabedian, head of marketplace trends at Rentrak.
Walt Disney Co. and Pixar’s “Toy Story 5” came in second at the box office this weekend with a domestic three-day gross of $31 million. Angel Studios’ biopic “Young Washington” ($20.8 million), Warner Bros. and DC Studios’ “Supergirl” ($9.6 million) and Universal’s “Disclosure Day” ($6 million) rounded out the top five, according to Rentrak.
The haul for “Minions & Monsters,” coupled with the strong holdover performance of “Toy Story 5,” proved again that family films are making a dent in the summer box office.
“Toy Story 5” has now brought in a total of $764.3 million worldwide, and last month, Universal, Illumination and Nintendo’s “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” crossed $1 billion at the global box office, becoming the first film of any kind to do so this year.
The rest of the summer theatrical lineup is also expected to bring in audiences and push domestic box office totals closer to pre-pandemic figures. Next week, Disney will release its live-action “Moana,” followed by Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” and Sony Pictures’ “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.”
To date, the summer box office is now about $2.3 billion, a nearly 12% increase compared with the same period a year ago, according to Rentrak data. Compared with pre-pandemic 2019’s numbers, however, it is still down about 7%.
Earlier this year, a widely circulated 15-second AI-generated video of Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise on a rooftop sparked outrage across Hollywood. One screenwriter called the cinematic clip “terrifying.” The Motion Picture Assn. demanded the company behind the artificial intelligence tool — Chinese tech giant ByteDance — halt its “infringing activity.”
Despite the uproar, the former majority owner of TikTok has quietly continued to court filmmakers, independent artists and executives who are eager to adopt the AI video generation model called Seedance.
Seedance was launched in the U.S. this spring at a Santa Monica event hosted by a group linked to the Chinese government.
ByteDance began hiring for 100 open roles, signed multiple independent filmmakers and artists and held private conversations about financing AI films. The company threw a lavish caviar party at Cannes and in May hosted panels promoting its cinematic tool at Amazon’s AI on the Lot event in Culver City.
“Like any new technology, Hollywood ultimately has no choice but to react to market realities. And that reality is that the new crop of AI-empowered Hollywood creatives see Seedance as having the most powerful video generator in the market right now,” said Peter Csathy of Creative Media, an entertainment and AI business advisory firm.
Joel Kuwahara, the animation producer on early seasons of “The Simpsons,” echoed Hollywood’s quiet embrace.
“Within the industry, I know that a lot of studios haven’t approved Seedance, but yet with a wink and a nod, they’re allowing Seedance to be used. … It’s kind of like a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ kind of a thing,’” Kuwahara told The Times.
ByteDance declined to comment on its U.S. expansion.
The race to build the dominant AI video model has created a fierce rivalry, pitting U.S. companies against the fast-closing Chinese competitors. On the American side, there are Google Veo and startups such as Runway and Luma. OpenAI’s Sora has discontinued its video tool.
The Chinese challengers Seedance, Kling and Alibaba’s HappyHorse have rapidly closed the gap on cinematic realism and have upstaged their American rivals by undercutting them on cost.
According to Artificial Analysis, a company that tracks cost and performances of different AI models, China’s Seedance is currently the most cost-effective and high-quality option compared with U.S. competitors. Seedance costs $9 per minute for video with audio generation, significantly lower than the $24 per minute required by Google’s Veo model.
That makes it an attractive tool for independent filmmakers like Rupert Wainwright, who recently met with Seedance executives at AI on the Lot.
He wants to use the the tool to help make his feature-length film called “Sebastian,” about a Christian saint set in 3rd century Rome. The hybrid AI film will be shot partly on location in Europe and partly generated with artificial intelligence.
“It’s the equivalent to when streaming a movie over the internet onto your TV finally became possible,” Wainwright said.
Kavan Cardoza.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
A scene from “The Chronicles of Bone.”
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
In May, Steven Schneider, the producer of “Paranormal Activity,” famous for its handheld grainy footage-style filmmaking, announced “Terrarium,” his first hybrid AI horror production. The film’s director, Jason Zada, said it will be entirely generated using Seedance’s model.
Zada’s filmmaking workflow involves writing, casting, prompting and editing all simultaneously, allowing him to rewrite scripts based on “dailies” generated by AI that day.
He estimates that generating 15 seconds of high-definition video costs only $5.
“We could go from a very detailed outline, very detailed characters and have it be a bit more fluid, because we could regen[erate] as much as we want,” Zada said.
Zada plans to shoot the movie first on a soundstage with real actors and will decide later which parts work better traditionally and what should be done synthetically. He’s a member of the Directors Guild of America and said he will be employing union actors for his hybrid AI film.
Seedance also has continued building ties by offering indie creators, AI-native studios and filmmakers free monthly credits and access to unreleased features. These “tastemakers” beta test its models, offer feedback on what works, and use it for their personal filmmaking projects — which creates corporate brand awareness.
Kavan Cardoza is one such breakout filmmaker. His AI fantasy series, “The Chronicle of Bones,” which uses Seedance, features half a dozen distinct storylines and an ensemble of characters. New episodes, each not more than 30 minutes, are released on YouTube once a month. The solo filmmaker averages 3 million views per episode and has cultivated a YouTube audience of 500,000.
Most filmmakers are tool agnostic, but lately Cardoza has become completely dependent on Seedance, he said, because it solves a persistent problem: maintaining character consistency between shots.
Kavan Cardoza unmasked.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
To create one of his characters, “the last lost boy,” Cardoza took self-portraits wearing a three-faced mask and a tattered brown jacket. He used those reference images for the AI character and transforms them into a stylized person, with a personality, backstory and visual details. He fed those images back to Seedance to get consistent characters — repeating the process for each member of the cast.
“I can’t go get Brad Pitt because he costs like $5, 10, 20 million to be in my film,” Cardoza said. “I can probably get a synthetic actor that will act just as good as Brad Pitt in the future. That’s crazy to me.”
Cardoza has copyrighted his script and characters, and aims to eventually attract major studio interest to turn his intellectual property into a film which comes with a built-in fan base.
Such plans are likely to face resistance from the performers union SAG-AFTRA, which has decried the use of synthetic actors such as Tilly Norwood.
“The rise of Seedance comes down to [its] focus on pleasing filmmakers and making things that look filmic,” said Stephan Vladimir Bugaj, senior vice president of JioStar, a joint venture between Disney and India’s Reliance Industries.
ByteDance introduced timeline-based prompting so filmmakers can actually pick specific moments and tweak them, and improved the understanding of camera direction, physics, lighting and fluidity of action. All of this, Bugaj said, “unlocked a kind of spectacle filmmaking that the other models are not delivering quite as well.”
The company’s tool has been in such high demand, Zada said, that Seedance has been quoting some major Hollywood studios $2 million for unrestricted special access.
While acknowledging Seedance’s popularity and its U.S. expansion, Amit Jain, chief executive of Luma, said its ceiling in Hollywood is severely limited. Traditional studios might adopt Chinese models for some preproduction tasks such as concepting, but the geopolitical and intellectual property risks for commercial generations are too prohibitive.
“Can you imagine Disney using the ByteDance model for the next ‘Snow White’? No way,” Jain said. “This is not even a technical argument, really. That’s the reality.”
Luma has been making inroads into Hollywood selling its software but has separately funded a production service company to teach filmmakers to make hybrid AI films using its tools.
Despite conservative production budgets, AI spending by media companies is projected to grow from $2.6 billion to $12.5 billion from 2024 to 2029, according to a State of Generative AI Media report.
Kavan Cardoza flips through pages of his fine-art photography book.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Bugaj warned that the quality and competitive price of Chinese models should be a “wake-up call” for American players fighting for market share.
“We’re not loyal,” said Zada, the filmmaker. “Whatever is the best, we’re going to use it.”
Nearly a year after the expiration of a $7,500 federal tax incentive for new electric vehicles, California is stepping in to try to motivate buyers to go electric.
Gov. Gavin Newsom allocated $135 million in his new state budget to provide incentives for new and used EVs. Participating automakers will match the funds.
California leads the nation in EV adoption, though the market has taken a hit under the Trump administration.
The state budget — a more than $350-billion spending plan — went into effect Wednesday. The EV incentives will take effect in the coming weeks as the California Air Resources Board irons out agreements with dealerships.
Here’s what you need to know.
What are the incentives worth?
Senate Bill 168 tasked the California Air Resources Board with setting incentive amounts for new and used electric vehicles sold in California.
Eligible buyers will receive $3,500 off for new EVs and $1,750 off for used ones. Unlike the federal tax credits that expired in September, these incentives offer an instant discount and don’t require buyers to apply for credit later.
State funds will cover half of the incentive amount, and auto manufacturers will cover the other half.
The rebates will mean that most eligible buyers will effectively get between 4% and 7% of their money back.
For used EVs, “this incentive helps what’s already a good deal become an even better deal,” said auto analyst Brian Moody. “I think that’s the perfect use of these kinds of dollars.”
What are the rules and exceptions?
The new incentives can’t be used on all electric vehicles — they apply only to new EVs with a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $50,000 or less, and used EVs with a sale price of $25,000 or less.
The $50,000 maximum rules out many options on the market, but legislation outlining the incentive program makes a special exception for California-based companies. Buyers purchasing a new or used EV from a company with headquarters in California can claim the discount regardless of the vehicle price.
That’s good news for Lucid, with headquarters in Newark, Calif., and for Irvine-based Rivian. Neither company currently offers new vehicles for less than $50,000. Rivian said it plans to launch a $44,990 SUV in 2027.
Who is eligible?
California’s new EV discounts are available only to first-time EV buyers, according to the legislation.
SB 168 says the buyer’s eligibility will be “confirmed by a buyer attestation” that they have not previously owned a zero-emission vehicle.
The new EV incentive is less than half of the federal incentive that expired nine months ago. Whereas the federal incentive may have been enough to spark interest in a range of buyers, Moody said the lesser amount will probably appeal mainly to people who already have their eye on an EV.
“I think you have to already be considering it, or in the market,” Moody said. “I think that the amount is just right for that.”
What are California’s clean car goals?
The incentives are intended to help California reach its electric vehicle and air quality goals as those targets have been under fire from President Trump.
Shortly after taking office, Trump signed an executive order that revoked California’s authority to set its own EV regulations, which included a goal of having 100% of new vehicle sales in the state be zero-emission by 2035.
California sued the administration in response. The state also has goals, including some that have been in place since 2012, that set declining limits on smog-causing pollutants and required automakers to sell increasing percentages of electric and hybrid vehicles through 2025.
In March, the administration filed a new lawsuit again trying to block California’s ability to set stricter-than-federal emissions standards for cars.
Early this year, California announced that more than 2.5 million zero-emission vehicles had been sold in the state since 2010, surpassing a target to put 1.5 million zero-emission vehicles on the road by 2025.
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