Fox News medical contributor Marc Siegel sounded the alarm on Tuesday that the measles outbreak impacting the southwest United States “is not going to be stopped without the vaccine,” all while lamenting that “vaccine confidence is at an all-time low.”
Siegel suggested that vaccine mandates during the coronavirus had led to lower vaccination rates, while conveniently leaving out his own network’s role in peddling anti-vaccine rhetoric to its conservative viewers that contributed towards plummeting confidence among Republicans.
During a Tuesday segment on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom, anchor Bill Hemmer brought on Siegel to discuss the rising measles cases in Texas and New Mexico. Hemmer added that this has placed new HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – whom Fox News relentlessly promoted ahead of his confirmation – in the spotlight due to his vaccine skepticism. Critics have previously blamed Kennedy for a drop in measles vaccinations in Samoa that led to dozens of deaths – an accusation he has denied.
“The best thing to do for measles is vaccinate,” Siegel said. “That vaccine, if you take both doses as a child, is 97 percent effective. In Gaines County, where this has started, we’re only having an 80 percent uptick of that vaccine because of all the exemptions. And more laws have been passed in the state of Texas, and they are about to be passed, allowing more and more exemptions.”
Siegel added that, among the unvaccinated, measles leads to hospitalizations in about one in 10 cases and that over a dozen Texas patients are currently in the hospital with the disease. “This is not going to be stopped without the vaccine,” he added.
Hemmer, meanwhile, pointed out that the United States had declared measles eliminated in 2000, meaning that the disease had not spread domestically for over 12 months. However, measles – which is especially dangerous for children under five – is now spreading once again in this country.
“Look, Bill, vaccine confidence is at an all-time low. We know why. Vaccines were pushed on people,” Siegel declared. “What I do is I have a conversation with people in my office and I explain what vaccines are for, how they work, why we need them the way I just did. We have to meet people where they live. That’s the way back to vaccine confidence.”
While Siegel – who early in the pandemic suggested COVID-19 was no more dangerous than the flu – is placing the blame for vaccine skepticism on mitigation efforts, studies have found that much of the right-wing opposition to vaccinations lays squarely at Fox News’ feet.
A Colorado University-Boulder study conducted in the spring of 2022 found that “people who get their news from an ideologically diverse array of sources are more likely to get vaccinated, regardless of their political affiliation.” However, that rate plummeted among those who primarily consume Fox News and other MAGA media sources.
“The study found that people who reported consuming more conservative media were significantly less likely to be vaccinated and boosted,” the study noted. “The researchers noted that, for example, Fox News pundit Sean Hannity told viewers at the time that COVID-19 was made up by the ‘deep state,’ and then-Fox business anchor Trish Regan characterized the virus as ‘a scam.’”
Additional research found that there were significantly lower rates of vaccinations among Fox News viewers under 65 after the COVID-19 vaccines were first publicly made available, which coincided with hosts like Tucker Carlson repeatedly painting the shots as ineffective and even dangerous.
“Our results show that Fox News is reducing COVID-19 vaccination uptake in the United States, with no evidence of the other major networks having any effect,” the ETH Zurich study concluded. “[T]here is an association between areas with higher Fox News viewership and lower vaccinations… media emphasis on minority viewpoints against scientific consensus is linked to vaccination hesitancy.”
