Trump’s campaign against public health is back on

Former President Donald Trump left the White House amid a public health emergency that his own messaging helped exacerbate. Now, as he campaigns to retake the presidency, he is once again politicizing long-held best practices for stopping infectious diseases.

With Covid-19 again on the upswing and amid an ongoing measles outbreak, the former president is taking aim at school vaccine requirements from the campaign stump, promising to defund the districts that mandate students receive certain vaccines.

The real danger in Trump’s words is not any actual loss of education funding — that threat is toothless, experts say — but the continued normalizing of anti-vaccine attitudes.

People are already losing trust in vaccines: Only 40 percent of Americans believe it is extremely important for parents to get their children vaccinated, down from 64 percent in 2001. It is perhaps the most worrying trend in public health right now.