Editor:
President Trump arrives in Doonbeg, County Clare this weekend for a golf holiday, anticipating TV cameras and newsreels following his every move.
I so wish we could just ignore him and instead honour the people whose legacies he has trampled all over in his few short years in office.
The MMR vaccine is in the news because Trump wants to separate the vaccines and give one measles, one mumps, then one rubella, all at separate visits.
Missing from his message is the voice of children. MMR is two recommended doses. Effectively, Trump is proposing that instead of two needles – one at 12 months and one at school age, children will get six needles. Triple pain, triple the chance of side effects.
Triple the chance of missing a shot at the time when the science says the risk of infection and serious disease or death, is highest.
At a time when cases of measles have risen across Europe and spiralled in the US, with two recent tragic deaths, following the science on what works to prevent illness is more important than ever.
In 1963, a five year old girl called Jeryl Lynn woke up in the middle of the night with a sore throat. Her father, Maurice Hilleman was a scientist at the pharmaceutical company Merck. He swabbed his daughter’s throat and incubated the virus in culture dishes of chick cells. As it became adapted to chickens it lost the ability to infect humans and so became a vaccine.
Hilleman later combined the mumps shot with measles and rubella vaccines to create the MMR vaccine that was licenced in 1971 and subsequently introduced in Ireland in 1988.
Before the measles vaccine was introduced in 1985, Ireland recorded over 5,000 cases of measles annually, spiking to almost 10,000 cases during an epidemic in 1985. During the 1980s, about 5 children died from measles every year before the vaccine was introduced. Cases, hospitalisations and deaths plummeted after introduction of the measles vaccine in 1985, followed by the MMR in 1988.
The third vaccine in the MMR is rubella, not a severe disease unless contracted in pregnancy when it can cause severe birth defects. During an epidemic in the US in 1964 to 1965, 20,000 infants were born with congenital rubella syndrome. Of those, 11,000 were born deaf; 3,500 blind; and 1,800 with intellectual disabilities.
It is easy to forget how serious these infections are when effective vaccines are widely available and the majority of children are vaccinated, preventing highly infectious vaccines from circulating in the community. Taking that lightly is a mistake.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was founded in 1961 by former US President John F Kennedy. USAID was the largest foreign aid agency in the world until it received major cutbacks in 2025, when the Trump administration slashed the funding of projects in global health, education, environmental protection and democratic governance. For two decades, from 2001 to 2021, USAID programmes were estimated to save up to 4.7 million lives per year including up to 1.7 million children under five.
As important, tracking disease has virtually stopped, reducing the ability to spot new outbreaks, such as the devastating Ebola outbreak in the DRC before it gets out of control, which is what has currently happened.
Trump has repeatedly derided the Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, as a “100% Communist Lunatic” who is “destroying New York.”
In less than a year, Mamdani has passed a city budget, secured $1.2 billion funding for universal healthcare, approved a rent freeze for rent-stabilised apartments, and announced a block-by-block housing plan to encourage affordable construction and tenant protections.
Despite these astounding achievements that Trump has trampled all over, the US President continues to dominate the newsreels with his fake news, incessant boasting and dialing almost everything down to “the deal.”
Can’t we just ignore him this weekend and let him play his golf without fanfare until he climbs into “the Beast” and leaves us in peace?
Dr. Catherine Conlon
Cork
Dr. Conlon is a public health doctor in Cork and former lecturer at the School of Public Health, University College Cork
