Conservative pundit Betsy McCaughey, inventor of the Obamacare “death panels” rumor, visited the Newsmax show “America’s Forum” today to urge listeners to vaccinate their children in the wake of a measles outbreak in California that health officials have pinned on people who refuse to be vaccinated. But it’s not just anti-vaxxers who are to blame for the outbreak, McCaughey said. She also blamed the measles outbreak on immigrants, saying that “sadly our federal government is not taking any responsibility at all for preventing people who are carrying measles from entering the country.”
J.D. Hayworth, the former Arizona congressman and host of “America’s Forum,” was eager to blame the measles outbreak on immigrants as well, particularly the Central American children who fled to the southern border earlier this year who, as far as we know, have absolutely no connection to the measles outbreak that started at Disneyland. (In fact, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, where most of the children came from, have higher measles vaccination rates than the U.S.)
“You’re just talking about legal immigration, and you take a look at the last year and the influx of juveniles from Central America and obviously we have problems, so there are a couple of reasons at work,” Hayworth said.
“So, Betsy, you’re telling us that part of it is an anti-vaccine movement, but the other part is illegal immigration,” he prompted.
“It’s immigration of all sorts,” McCaughey said, citing the case of unvaccinated Amish missionaries (U.S. citizens) from Ohio who carried the disease back from the Philippines and a outbreak in Houston in the 1990s that reportedly stemmed from immigrants from Mexico but was worsened by low vaccination rates.
“We’re allowing it to be carried into the country and that’s wrong,” she said.
There is a long tradition of the anti-immigrant movement of attempting to blame disease outbreaks on immigrants, which was revived in force by the right-wing media in connection to the crisis at the border this summer. Back in August, Hayworth memorably had his fearmongering about child immigrants carrying diseases shut down by an infectious disease expert, but he doesn’t seem to have learned anything from the experience.
