Here we go again.

We don’t just mean Trump II, the sequel, but the latest scare about vaccines, specifically against an age-old enemy, measles.

This time it’s in Texas where the number of measles cases has hit 159 — an increase of 13 cases in the past five days, authorities said Tuesday. Most of the sick people, including a young child who died, hadn’t been vaccinated against the virus.

Amid the Texas outbreak, vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy, newly confirmed as the nation’s Health and Human Services secretary, voiced halfhearted support for the measles vaccine.

Kennedy’s response, in an editorial published Sunday by Fox News, stopped short of fully embracing vaccination against the disease.

Saying he was “deeply concerned about the recent measles outbreak,” Kennedy wrote that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine “is crucial to avoiding potentially deadly disease.”

But according to news reports, Kennedy has been taking steps to minimize the importance of vaccination. Under his leadership, two meetings to discuss next steps for vaccines were canceled.

And he’s “collecting names of potential new members to put on a committee that recommends which vaccines Americans should get and when, according to people familiar with the matter,” The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Kennedy did acknowledge that measles — one of the most contagious viruses in the world — is especially risky to unvaccinated people — but stopped short of urging the public to get the MMR vaccine.

“The decision to vaccinate is a personal one,” Kennedy wrote.

Critics pounced on Kennedy’s comments, saying he also initially seemed to downplay the outbreak last week saying annual outbreaks were “not unusual.”

Kennedy, as most Americans have surely heard, has previously made numerous false and misleading claims about the safety of the MMR vaccine.

The myth that measles vaccinations have been linked to autism largely stemmed from a study published in the British medical journal Lancet in 2008.

The study was proven to be flawed, and Lancet issued a retraction in 2010. The magazine Pediatrics in 2014 published a review by experts at UCLA, Boston Children’s Hospital and Rand Corp. of more than 60 scientific medical studies of vaccine safety.

They concluded that problems are “extremely rare” and strongly encouraged parents to vaccinate their children.

Measles is one of the most infectious and dangerous diseases known to humanity. Before the introduction of the measles vaccine, about 500,000 Americans got it every year, with thousands hospitalized and nearly 500 deaths annually. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls vaccination for this and other deadly diseases one of the 10 great public health achievements of the 20th century.

According to the CDC, about one in five people infected with measles require hospitalization and almost one in three of every 1,000 infected children die from respiratory and neurologic complications.

This latest outbreak recalls the Disneyland measles outbreak that began with an exposure at the California theme park in December 2014 and spread to seven states.

Again, it was mainly spread through unvaccinated people. Since then, we’ve all gone through the hysteria surrounding the COVID vaccines, which, ironically, were fast tracked in the first Trump administration, and that saved perhaps millions of lives.

Don’t fall for the conspiracy theories.

The best way to protect yourself, your family and the greater community is to stay up to date on vaccines.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel