Good news about pertussis, also known as whooping cough: despite fears that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s unconventional views about childhood vaccines would lead to a resurgence of the disease, reported cases have actually declined from a recent high during the Biden-Harris administration.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted 28,783 cases of the disease in 2025, down from 43,321 in 2024. And so far in 2026, the numbers are down even more, with 4,763 cases total and the year nearly half over.
How does the New York Times cover the reassuring news? With an alarmist, top-of-the-front-page headline calculated to appeal to the negativity bias of readers and whip up a panic among parents.
“Doctors Seeing Grim Illnesses Strike Unvaccinated Children” is the headline that appeared on the Times front page this week, “above the fold” for those old enough to know or care about such distinctions. The article is dismissive about the actual statistics, which is ironic, because the whole point of the article is to portray the Trump administration as dangerously anti-science. The Times writes, “For some of these diseases, national data show clear and substantial increases in recent years; for others, the increases are small, or there are anecdotal indications from doctors on the ground of increases that public statistics don’t currently confirm.”
Another term for “[a]necdotal indications from doctors on the ground of increases that public statistics don’t currently confirm” might be a panicdote, a portmanteau of “panic” and “anecdote.”
For a sense of what the Times is up to, consider that the newspaper reports about whooping cough, “there were more than 28,000 cases reported last year, compared with around 7,000 in 2023.” By giving the numbers for 2025 and 2023 without mentioning the peak in 2024 or the lower numbers for 2026, the Times is cherry-picking data in a way that seems calculated to stoke fear rather than to accurately portray reality.
The product being delivered here to Times readers is not accurate disease surveillance; instead, it’s the feeling of superiority over those deplorable Trump voters. “Stupid Is As Stupid Does” is the headline over one Times reader comment, upvoted by 1,500 other Times readers, enough to qualify it as a “reader pick.” Said the comment, “Gee, who could have seen *that* coming?! I’m sooo tired of these yapping, ignorant, conspiracy-theory-addled anti-vax and anti-science people. They need to be across the board ignored and silenced. I’m tired of giving lunatics the time of day and acting like we have to listen to them.”
Where is, or was, the pertussis boom? In 2025 the states with the highest numbers of cases were California, Oregon, and Washington, not exactly hotbeds of Trump support.
A public broadcasting reporter in Oregon, Amelia Templeton, tried to understand what was happening and attributed the rise not to Trump or Kennedy but to changes in the formulation of the vaccine and to the aftereffects of COVID-era social distancing. “In the 1980s, the United States shifted to using shots that had less of the pertussis bacteria in them, known as acellular vaccines. Following that shift, epidemiologists started to see a resurgence, often in school-aged children who had been vaccinated years earlier. Their conclusion: immunity from the acellular vaccines doesn’t last as long,” she reported. Also, “the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. That likely led to less passive immunity from recent infections in the population and contributed to the current rise in cases.”
The Times blames not social distancing or the vaccine formulations but rather “distrust in vaccines that grew during the Covid-19 pandemic, and that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump have amplified.”
The Times article hangs on “doctors around the country say.” It names six doctors: Meghan Hofto, Jessica Kirk, Robin Harrison, Taylor Rosenbaum, Sonali Meyer, and Erin Charles. Kirk donated $250 in 2024 to the Democratic Victory PAC, federal campaign finance records show. Meyer gave $150 to a Democrat-aligned emergency physicians political action committee in 2024, another $150 in April 2026, $100 in October 2020 and $200 in November 2020, federal campaign finance records show. Rosenbaum gave two $47 contributions in October 2024 to the Harris campaign, records show.
So at least three of the Times‘s six “doctors around the country” participating in the panicdote story about a Trump-driven whooping cough outbreak are Democratic political donors. The Times doesn’t disclose that to readers, keeping it a secret just like the number of whooping cough cases in 2024 and in 2026. We’re happy to fill in the missing information here, at least until we are “silenced” the way the Times reader comment suggests.
The Times article quotes no parents or patients, just the doctors. Some reporting might find that the non-vaccinators are a variegated group and include a lot of progressive back-to-the-land types. They might even include some illegal immigrants or asylum seekers. They aren’t all the MAGA-hat-wearing villains of the New York Times commenter or editor’s imagination.
It’s a sad thing, because trusted information about public health risks is important for people to understand what to do when there are genuine risks. For the Times to start treating communicable diseases like homelessness or antisemitism—something that it pays attention to spikes in or hypes when Republicans are in control, while largely downplaying when Democrats are in power—will just further erode already weak public confidence in the press.
“This country needs a fair press,” Trump said Thursday afternoon in the Oval Office, going on about “how corrupt our media is.” The Times describes comments like that as a symptom of Trump’s supposed authoritarianism, yet articles like this one make Trump’s criticism seem accurate. When Trump makes anecdote-based claims about election fraud or immigrant-driven crime that aren’t supported by statistics, the Times gets all worked up in a lather about how irresponsible it is. How is this Times news article any different from that, other than it’s on the other partisan side? If there were a vaccine to take against Trump Derangement Syndrome, it sure could be deployed with good effect at the New York Times.
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