Report: Whooping Cough Spreading

The Daily Mail reported Wednesday that pertussis, commonly known as whooping cough, has been found in states across America.

According to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from Sept. 28, year to date, there have been 16,375 weekly cases. The 2023 year-to-date data said there have been 3,771.

Dr. Tina Tan, a pediatric infectious disease physician at Northwestern University and the president-elect of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, attributed the rise in cases to declining vaccination rates.

"There still is a lot of vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaxxers out there that will not vaccinate their kids," she told NPR.

Tan went on to recommend the whooping cough vaccine for pregnant mothers. The most common whooping cough vaccine is known as DTaP. DTaP stands for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis.

"That's why it's important," she added, "for pregnant women to get the pertussis vaccine when they're pregnant so that you can protect your baby for the first two months of life until they're old enough to be vaccinated themselves."

While Tan recommended getting the DTaP vaccine to babies, others have waged criticism over whooping cough vaccines.

During a town hall for the 2024 presidential election hosted by Newsnation, now President-elect Donald Trump's pick for HHS secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while speaking on the DTP vaccine, which was later replaced by the DTaP vaccines, said that while it protected babies or children against whooping cough, it left their immune systems compromised and vulnerable to other diseases resulting in death.

"The most popular vaccine in the world is the DTP vaccine, diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. We banned, we got rid of it in this country because it was causing injuries, brain injuries, severe brain injuries or death to one in every 300 children," Kennedy said. "We used it in the ’80s, and that's why there was all this litigation against vaccine companies that precipitated the passage of the Vaccine Act that then gave them immunity from liability, but ... in Europe, they don't use it. In America, they don't use it. But we give it to 161 million African children a year."

 "So," Kennedy continued, "Bill Gates asked the Danish government to support that program and said it saved 30 million lives.

"The Danish government said, 'Show us the data.' He wasn't able to. So they went to Africa and did their own studies. And they looked at 30 years of DTP data. And what they found shocked them all. They found that girls who got the DTP were dying at 10 times the rate of unvaccinated girls. But they were dying of things that nobody had ever associated with the vaccine.

"They were dying of anemia, malaria, bilharzia, pulmonary disease, respiratory disease, and pneumonia. And nobody noticed for 30 years that it was the vaccinated girls and not the unvaccinated girls who were dying."

The disease is reported to be treated by antibiotics.

• Whooping Cough at a Decade-High Level in US
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