Tony Lyons: “Every hour we spend terrified of measles is an hour we’re not looking at what’s really filling our hospitals and cemeteries.”

Gov. Josh Shapiro tried to use ‘fear’ to pin measles deaths on RFK Jr., Lyons said on the MAHA Media Hub this week

[Tony Lyons, president of MAHA Action, introduced the September 2 MAHA Media Hub with the words below.]

I want to start today with measles, because if you’ve turned on a television this week, you’d think it was the only health story in America.

Let’s have some perspective. Secretary Kennedy laid out the numbers plainly: Over the last ten years, there have been three measles deaths in this country. Three. In that same span, nearly 12 million Americans died from food-induced chronic disease. That’s 1.2 million per year. And that doesn’t include deaths due to Big Pharma products. Think about that gap. The media and, as the Secretary put it, certain demagogue politicians are constantly working to scare us about infectious disease, while the chronic disease that’s actually killing us, the disease being manufactured by Big Food and Big Pharma, has been getting no attention at all. That’s not an accident. Fear is a tool. And every hour we spend terrified of measles is an hour we’re not looking at what’s really filling our hospitals and our cemeteries.

Now here’s where it gets serious, because we just watched the old Covid playbook get pulled right back off the shelf. In Pennsylvania, Governor Josh Shapiro rushed to Lancaster County, called a national press conference, and announced two measles deaths. Highly politicized. Finger-pointing, fear-mongering, exactly what we lived through five years ago.

But there’s a problem with the Governor’s story. The local officials say it isn’t true. Joshua Parsons, one of Lancaster County’s own commissioners, accused Shapiro of being deliberately deceptive. By law, contagious-disease deaths have to be reported to that coroner. Yet the county coroner said there were zero measles deaths. Zero. There was one heartbreaking case of an infant who died, and the coroner was clear: that child died with measles present, but not of measles. Neither the coroner nor the pathologist who examined the baby believed measles was the cause of death. And the second death the Governor claimed? Local officials say they’ve been given no information about it at all.

So think about what happened here. A governor stood in front of the nation and used the deaths of children to score political points and stoke fear, and the people who actually keep the records in that county can’t back him up. As Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said, this is exactly why there’s such deep distrust in public health: exploiting tragedy over the airwaves for political purposes. And Bhattacharya made another point that should embarrass everyone who ran with this. Governor Shapiro made a big deal that the children were “unvaccinated.” But babies aren’t even given the measles shot until they’re at least a year old. Of course the baby wasn’t vaccinated. That’s not evidence of anything: It’s a political agenda dressed up as data.

And let me be clear about what MAHA actually stands for here, because they’ll lie about this too. We are not telling anyone what to do. Lancaster County has a large Amish and Mennonite community, many of whom choose not to vaccinate. The resources are there for anyone who wants them. Mobile vaccination clinics are often brought into these communities. But ultimately, the decision to vaccinate still remains with parents in the state of Pennsylvania.

Secretary Kennedy’s job, as he describes it, is to do two things at once: manage actual infectious-disease outbreaks – which we’re doing better than any country in the world – and redirect the nation’s attention and resources back to the chronic disease that is truly killing Americans. That’s the balance. Handle the real risk honestly, and refuse to let anyone weaponize fear.

And President Trump himself weighed in this week, coming to the defense of the Amish and their right to make their own medical decisions. His message was clear, and it was right: leave the Amish alone. Respect their medical freedom. Here’s a community that has quietly lived by its own conscience for centuries, harming no one, and the reflex of the medical cartel is to reach in and force them to comply anyway. That reflex, that need to make everyone fall in line, is the very thing this movement exists to push back against. Nobody should be coerced – not the Amish, not you, not anyone. That’s not anti-vaccine. That’s pro-freedom.

President Trump also pointed to a 2010 study out of the Amish community that screened 1,899 children and identified seven confirmed cases of autism, and not one of those cases was in a completely unvaccinated child. Now, I want to be careful here, because this is exactly where the other side stops being careful. A finding like that doesn’t prove causation. It doesn’t prove anything on its own. But it raises a real question, a question any honest scientist should want to chase down rather than bury. And that’s the whole point, isn’t it? We’re not asking anyone to jump to a conclusion. We’re asking for the one thing they’ve fought us on for decades. Do honest, unbiased research not manipulated by the people who profit from vaccines. Run the study, publish the data, and let the truth be whatever it turns out to be. The people who are afraid of that question are telling you something about themselves.

Now I want to turn to something else that’s harming our kids every single day, in nearly every home in America, and this one crosses every political line there is. Screens.

Yesterday, HHS hosted the Live Real Life Symposium, bringing together leaders from technology, medicine, research, education, and advocacy to face an uncomfortable truth head-on: The devices in our children’s hands are doing real damage to how they grow, learn, and connect. Secretary Kennedy put it about as plainly as it can be put. “Our children get one childhood,” he said, “and we cannot allow screens to replace the real-world experiences they need to grow and thrive.”

One childhood. You don’t get it back. And we are letting an industry that engineered these devices to be as addictive as humanly possible steal that childhood.

And here’s the part I really want you to hear, because it’s the same fight we have with Big Food and Big Pharma, just wearing a different logo. Kennedy put the technology companies on notice, and his line was perfect: “No company should profit from keeping a child compulsively engaged on a screen.”

These platforms aren’t addictive by accident. Just like ultra processed food and opioids, they were designed that way, by some of the smartest engineers in the world, to hijack a child’s attention and hold it, because that attention is what they sell. He gave credit where it’s due, noting that Meta recently announced new protections for children and welcoming it. But he was clear about what comes next, and I’ll quote him:

“Now every technology company should act. End addictive design features for children, give parents real control, make safety the default.”

Dr. Oz brought this down to earth. He talks to Head Start teachers all over the country, and he says they tell him the same story again and again. While the child is with them, they’re making real progress, and then the kid goes home, gets handed a screen because the parents are busy or exhausted or just can’t cope, and starts living their whole life through that screen. Half the kids in America, Dr. Oz says, don’t even have books in their homes. And if you don’t have a book in your home, you don’t learn to read young. Everything gets harder from there. Screens are undermining the most basic building blocks of a childhood: creativity, curiosity, community, movement, sunlight, outdoor activities.

And Dr. Jay Bhattacharya told a personal story. His father smoked a pipe when Jay was a boy, and even as a kid, knowing smoking was bad, he’d hide his dad’s pipe. Fast forward to today, Jay finds himself on vacation with his own kids, holding four phones, looking at one after another instead of looking at his children. And his kids did to him exactly what he’d done to his father: They stole his phones and hid them. The idea that screen time might be harmful is still new, and the science is genuinely complicated and nuanced, but that full-circle moment tells you everything. We recognized one addiction a generation ago. We’re just now recognizing the next one.

Whether it’s what goes into our kids’ food, what goes into their arms, or what goes into their minds through a screen, the question is always the same: Are we protecting our children, or are we protecting the profits of the people harming them? MAHA has picked its side. And more and more, so has this country.

Today’s guests are on the front lines of exactly that fight. You’ll hear from Dr. Stephanie Haridopolos, the director of National Health Communications for the Office of the Surgeon General; Dr. Joe Ladapo, the Surgeon General of Florida, Brandon Hoffman, executive director of the MAHA Chiropractic Hub; Tanya Tay Posobiec, MAHA Mom; Dr. Gilles Lamarche, chiropractor and VP of University Advancement at Life University; and congressional candidate Jenny Costa Honeycutt.

But first, we’re joined by Mary Holland. She is the CEO of the incredible non-profit, Children’s Health Defense. A prolific author and a former professor at the NYU School of Law, Mary has been advocating for protecting children’s health for over 2 decades. Welcome back Mary!

[The complete September 2 MAHA Media hub is watchable on YouTube, here, beginning on 9/3 at 12pm Eastern.]

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