Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 78. Sunrise is 5:20 and sunset is 8:25, for 15 hours, 5 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 16 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1899, Pearl Hart, a female outlaw of the Old West, robs a stage coach 30 miles southeast of Globe, Arizona.
There have been legion conspiracy theories besetting some Wisconsinites over the last twenty-five years: 9/11 as an inside job, Obama’s birth certificate, claims the Clintons murdered several people, QAnon, that COVID-19 was a planned pandemic, the lab leak theory about COVID-19, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, that there is in America a ‘deep state,” and that elites are replacing whites with racial minorities. I’ve likely forgotten a few.
Wisconsin now faces another crackpot theory, about the cause of measles, from Wisconsin doctor Pierre Kory:
Last month, Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary and longtime anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attended the funeral for the second unvaccinated child in Texas to have died in the ongoing measles outbreak. While in Texas, he met with the two grieving families — along with two local doctors promoting unproven measles treatments, whom he called “extraordinary healers.”
Following the first death, Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the anti-vax organization Kennedy led until recently, pushed its own narrative claiming that the 6-year-old Mennonite girl did not actually die from the measles. In this effort, CHD has relied heavily on Pierre Kory, a Wisconsin doctor who has both amplified that assertion and claimed that the measles virus has been weaponized by unknown conspirators.
Kory is a Kennedy ally who has been widely criticized for spreading Covid misinformation during the pandemic, including pushing the use of ivermectin as a “miracle drug” for treating that virus.
For years, CHD and Kennedy have promoted the debunked claim that the standard measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine given to almost all children in the U.S. is tied to autism. With an upsurge in the pandemic-era, right-wing embrace of the anti-vax movement — and of Kennedy himself — there has been a notable decrease in routine pediatric vaccinations in the U.S.
Now that measles immunization rates have fallen below thresholds to maintain herd immunity in certain parts of the country, outbreaks such as the one in West Texas are expected to become more common. In February, Texas reported the country’s first measles death in a child in the more than two decades since the disease was classified as eradicated in the U.S.
In response to this death, CHD posted a video on March 19 featuring Kory and Ben Edwards, another Texas doctor Kennedy applauded, discussing the girl’s medical records, which her parents released to the organization.
Despite having no training in pediatric medicine and having had his board certifications in internal medicine and critical care revoked last year, Kory claimed the child’s death was due to incorrect antibiotic management of a bacterial pneumonia infection that had “little to do with measles.” Edwards — a family doctor who has been treating measles-stricken children in Texas with medications not indicated for measles and was accused of seeing pediatric patients while actively infected with measles himself — concurred with Kory.
(Emphasis added.)
See Center for Media and Democracy, Wisconsin doctor makes wild measles claims, Wisconsin Examiner, May 30, 2025.
Aerial video captures severe storm above Austin: