The World Health Organisation has been alerted to New Zealand’s latest epidemic of a disease that was eliminated years ago. The rise of an anti-vaccine movement and ideological opposition among some indigenous people to ‘Western medicine’ has brought back measles and, in some countries, polio.
According to RNZ, two WHO medical officers reviewed the Ministry of Health's measles epidemic preparedness report and noted "with concern" that measles immunisation was at its lowest since 2012.
"There are alarming gaps among Māori and Pacific peoples," their review said. This put the country at risk of a large outbreak, they added. New Zealand officially eliminated measles in 2017 and kept that status – despite the 2019 outbreak, which affected more than 2000 people – because it was able to eliminate the disease again.
But a new global epidemic is underway, with recent reports saying that locally, it has spread to high schools in Wellington as well as cases in Manawatū, Nelson, Northland, Taranaki, and Auckland.
The immunity gaps among Māori and Pacific people are due to low levels of vaccination. Among Māori under-fives, the vaccination rate is 72%, compared with 82% for the whole population. At least 95% coverage is needed to achieve herd immunity.
Medical authorities here and around the globe attribute declining vaccination rates to the growth of anti-science – a distrust of science that accelerated under the Covid-19 pandemic.
University of Pennsylvania Professor Michael Mann.
On the offensive
Two top American science advocates, Professor Michael Mann and Professor Peter Hotez, have gone on the offensive with Science Under Siege: How to fight the most powerful forces that threaten our world.
The alarmist tone of the subtitle belies their reputations. Mann is a high-profile climate change researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the many recipients of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and Al Gore, and the inventor of the ‘hockey stick’ graph showing global warming over the past 1000 years. He has published half a dozen books on climate change and has launched several defamation suits against his critics, including conservative journalist Mark Steyn and National Review.
His co-author Hotez is a paediatrician, microbiologist, virologist, and tropical disease expert at the Baylor College of Medicine and the Texas Children’s Hospital. Texas had its own measles outbreak earlier this year due to low vaccination rates after the Covid-19 pandemic. He helped develop one of the Covid-19 vaccines and, like Mann, has a take-no-prisoners approach to public health debates.
Both authors have borne the brunt of social and mainstream media attacks over climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as politicians, and their book is a response to the forces that “favour and promote scientific disinformation, challenge the basic tenets of public and planetary health, and twist behaviours in a way that threatens human lives and livelihoods”.
Dr Peter Hotez, of the Texas Children’s Hospital. (Photo: Agapito Sanchez).
Tolkien struggle
Furthermore, they identify a “complex spiderweb of malevolence that thrives on dark, bad actors and the nebulous activities of state entities”. On top of this, as Jews, they also call out the antisemitism in many of those they see as the forces of evil in a Tolkien-style struggle with the universal values of all that is good.
The linking of climate change and vaccination issues is core to their case against what they call the five Ps: plutocrats, petrostates, professionals, propagandists, and the press (media).
It’s not hard to identify these people and institutions, and they are paraded in seven densely sourced chapters. NBR readers will be familiar with some of them, including those embedded in the second Trump administration.
The US president has often labelled climate change as a hoax, and this sentiment is working its way through the vast machinery of state. However, Mann and Hotez have not attempted to deal with these actions, as most of the book deals with events before last year’s presidential election.
Elon Musk’s conversion of Twitter to X gave a platform to anti-vaxxers.
Paradoxical figure
This does not affect its relevance, although some references are dated, such as Elon Musk’s plunge out of political favour. He is a paradoxical figure among the plutocrats because he is not anti-science, and his Tesla business is an alternative to fossil-fuel-using cars.
But he earns his place due to his conversion of Twitter from a mouthpiece for ‘progressive’ causes to X, where the anti-science brigade became the dominant players. In addition, Musk’s brief government role in cutting back the public funding of science was viewed as retrogressive and damaging to the long-term interests of the United States.
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch wears his plutocrat’s label more easily thanks to Fox News and news outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, which give plenty of airtime and space to climate change critics and limited support to anti-vaxxers. Most contentious were the Fox personalities who promoted ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as Covid-19 cures, which also featured on X.
'Petrostates' covers the gamut of activities by the fossil fuel industry to downgrade its contribution to global warming, both at a state and corporate level. These range from the hosting of the UN’s COP climate change meetings by oil-rich countries to the funding of think tanks and Russia’s sponsorship of cyberwarfare.
Quack medicine
The professionals singled out for attention include people associated with the health-freedom and medical-freedom movements. These grew out of the 19th-century obsession with quack medicine, herbalism, and ‘alternative’ therapies.
The most egregious, according to the authors, is the association of the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine with autism. Originally promoted by the disgraced Andrew Wakefield, this discredited research has lived on with activists such as Robert F Kennedy Jr, now US Secretary of Health and Human Services. This makes him a polarising target for Mann and Hotez, whose daughter is autistic. He explains at length the neurological research that shows the genetic origins of autism before birth, and the lack of evidence linking it to the MMR vaccine.
RFK Jr, as he is known, has long been linked to the anti-vaxxer movement as well as other public-health conspiracies, such as chemtrails. His June 2019 visit to Samoa to oppose a WHO vaccination campaign after rates fell to just 34% was blamed for a subsequent outbreak that caused 79 deaths among unvaccinated babies.
Robert F Kennedy Jr heads Health and Human Services in the Trump administration.
Feminist turncoat
Moving on to the propagandists and press, Mann and Hotez count feminist Naomi Wolf as a turncoat. Famous for her condemnation of the cosmetics and fashion industries in The Beauty Myth (1991), Wolf was once an admirer of Mann’s climate change research. But he describes her latest work, The Bodies of Others (2022), as “336 pages of anti-scientific drivel” for its conspiracy theories on the Covid-19 lockdowns and vaccines, the 5G telecommunications technology, and the Ebola virus epidemic.
Naomi Wolf took up the anti-vaxxer cause.
Less extreme views in the media also come in for attention. Labelled the ‘soft doomers’, these were associated with early attempts at herd immunity in the Covid-19 pandemic. The best-known example is the Great Barrington Declaration of October 2020. It opposed what Mann and Hotez call the far more effective public health interventions such as immunisation, vaccine mandates, and lockdowns to limit hospital admissions.
Mann and Hotez have produced a manifesto that many may say is alarmist in its claim that scientific disinformation deserves as much urgency as the rise of Nazi Germany and global fascism nearly a century ago. “Antiscience has become a lethal force and a major global security issue,” they proclaim, urging that efforts be made at the highest levels to protect scientists from death threats online, or from being attacked by publicity-seeking demagogues.
Their plea invokes Tolkien’s good versus evil struggle in The Lord of the Rings. Whether it is heeded in the coming years may depend on the response to the measles outbreaks. Latest WHO figures show the disease has made a dramatic comeback in 2025 with 188,355 suspected cases reported worldwide by mid-June. These numbers are rising, with some estimates saying the total is now well over 200,000 cases.
Science Under Siege: How to fight the most powerful forces that threaten our world, by Michael Mann and Professor Peter Hotez (Scribe).
Nevil Gibson is a former editor at large for NBR.
