Jess Grose

Indiana Child Care Providers Struggle to Stay Open After State Slashes Rates With a freeze on child care voucher applications and cuts to reimbursement rates, Indiana child care providers are left reeling.

Over 100 childcare programs in Indiana have closed after the state froze voucher enrollment and deeply cut reimbursement rates www.the74million.org/zero2eight/i...

Opinion | Screens Are Everywhere in Schools. Do They Actually Help Kids Learn? (Published 2024)

A shout-out to @jessgrose.bsky.social, who gave voice to these concerns early in this groundswell:

KASIE HUNT: Over the summer you said, “There’s no vaccine that’s safe and effective”. Do you still believe that?

RFK JR: “I never said that.”

KASIE HUNT: “Play the clip.”

RFK JR (clip): “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” (March 2024)

ht: @cwebbonline.com

I mean, ideally. But I’m also hoping to inform people who care about vaccines to organize on a state level to close vaccine exemptions. Only four states do not allow religious exemptions. The only way to get back above heard immunity imho is to have these laws.

Definitely true. But more and more people are becoming vaccine hesitant and I want to at least try reaching them, even if I think they’re morons. Because their kids don’t deserve to get polio even if their parents are cranks.

Yeah I have been writing about them all. But to change state laws to get rid of vaccine exemptions we need to convince regular people to support that. So I think politicians should listen to people who are still angry.

Some people can be convinced to vaccinate their kids. Pediatricians convince them every day. Hesitation is on the rise so we still need to do that work. I answer every DM a skeptic sends to me as long as it’s not a personal attack.

Inconsistent messaging from public health — schools closed but people have to go to work anyway in person. That was the reality for a lot of people and led to loss of trust

Yeah i don’t get it either. I don’t think they still talk about it often but I do think it animates their distrust.

Yeah I agree! But we can’t force them to vote how we want or to not be angry, we have to convince them. And a lot of people were essential workers without family caregivers just generally — without the disability aspect.

Why are you making this personal? Did I say I personally felt this way? This is what my reporting and polling suggest.

Like what? The school had been providing her kid with an aide. That stopped. She had to go to work because her job was essential. What kind of alternatives was she ignoring? How could set backs and pain for her been avoided by her individual actions?

Some of their kids still have longterm learning and mental health issues. I think saying screw their feelings isn’t that productive if anybody actually wants to change their minds or get policy passed that is pro vaccine

It’s not extreme. It’s the law in four state — five before West Virginia changed its law but that’s still tied up in litigation and confusion. California passed a law outlawing exemptions after the Disneyland outbreak in 2019.

Opinion | Who Will Prevent More Measles Deaths?

It is infuriating—no religion is against vaccination. Catholic schools don’t give exemptions because they believe vaccines protect life. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/o...

RFK Jr.’s damage to the CDC is ‘past the point of no return,’ Dr. Demetre Daskalakis warns “The CDC you knew is over,” the infectious diseases doctor told The Advocate. “Unless someone takes radical action, there is nothing there that can be salvaged.”

there is no question in my mind that rfk jr is the most dangerous person in this administration and that his eugenicist ideology threatens the lives of millions of people www.advocate.com/politics/dem...

I deleted the post because I do not want to be misunderstood. The original post was meant to be about decades of under resourcing poor communities and when there are short word counts sometimes you cannot get in all the nuance.

I think people have every right to be mad about a ton of stuff health related and I write about it all the time.

Ok so men are in crisis or they’re not? It sounds like they’re doing roughly the same!! Some women are doing poorly and some men are too. I don’t know what you want from me atp

They’re not prioritizing “happiness” they’re prioritizing caregiving— and the gap now is 3 hours a week, not enormous. Women consistently have far less leisure than men do.

But just looking at education is fine? Men and women in this country are struggling — possibly in different ways. Buy the idea that men are the only ones in crisis is incorrect. Mental health overall among young women is worse, for example.

These stats are based on working the same number of hours — they’re comparing apples to apples.

It depends on who you are talking about. Single moms in their teens and 20s are doing very poorly — they tend to be the lowest earners overall. College educated middle and upper class people of both genders are doing well. Men in the bottom ten percent are also doing very poorly.

I don’t object to boys being helped at all — when have I ever said that?? I object to the narrative that girls are all doing great because more of them graduate from college now.

Again — see the fact that this topic is constantly published in every left leaning magazine and newspaper under the sun. I can’t name one it *hasn’t* appeared in

No one is talking about an issue that is literally in every opinion section constantly and the subject of a book that propelled our VP elect into national prominence?! The idea that no one is talking about the struggles of boys right now is just not true