Letters to the Editor | Aug. 17, 2026

The plan to split the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines into three separate shots is being sold as another option for parents. It isn’t one, not for years, maybe not ever. No single-antigen measles, mumps, or rubella vaccine is licensed in the United States. Merck stopped making the old separate versions in 2008, concluding that three shots offered no medical benefit over one and simply meant more needles and more missed appointments. Rebuilding them means new clinical trials, new manufacturing lines, and years of FDA review; Merck’s own estimate runs past a decade, and no ethics board will approve testing that withholds a proven vaccine from children for a placebo. As Paul Offit of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia put it, splitting the shot would “just make it more expensive and less likely to be used.” This arrives as the country is logging its worst measles year in three decades, with outbreaks in more than 30 states. Parents deserve confidence in the vaccine that already works, not a hollow promise about one that doesn’t exist yet.

Bruce Grant, Philadelphia

The Kennedy Center board apparently voted to defy a federal court order instructing it not to add the current president’s name to the official name, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The board is not a formal part of the current administration, but its trustees are mostly loyalists appointed by the president, and even include ex officio members of his cabinet.

Despite being ordered to remove President Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center signage in a previous ruling, the board would have you believe the new inscription adding “Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump” to the facade of the building somehow does not run afoul of the letter and spirit of the court’s instructions.

This obsession to memorialize the current president is more than just a metaphor for presidential power. It runs counter to specific congressional statutory intent to have the Kennedy Center be a living memorial to the late John F. Kennedy and him alone. President Kennedy asked Americans in his inaugural address in 1961 to “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” The board has flipped the meaning of Kennedy’s plea to “ask what can you do for Trump.” This pressure campaign should be stopped in its tracks.

Anthony Arnaud, Laguna Niguel, Calif.

As the war in Iran continues, we recognize this destructive, illegal war rests on false pretexts.

Iran was complying with inspections under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Only after the U.S. withdrew did Iran admit to breaching enrichment limits. The agreement worked — we left, then attacked Iran for not abiding by it.

As we mark 81 years this month since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we find ourselves at war with a nation that had agreed to inspections guaranteeing compliance.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others want to push aside multilateral systems, believing power concentrated under one leader works better — no pesky variables to consider. But “multilateral system” is simply a fancy term for what we built in the United Nations. Alongside partners who value prosperity and rules-based order, we created systems that reduce war, instability, hunger, and the conflicts that drive migration and humanitarian crises. The ratified international laws aren’t just words on paper — they are a foundation that works for us all.

International courts are part of that system. When leaders delegitimize them, it may seem advantageous, but there’s always another bully.

Security is only built collaboratively. Our current path — breaking agreements, threatening to commit war crimes in violation of the Geneva Conventions, demeaning international courts — leads away from health, happiness, and prosperity, not toward them.

Tina Shelton, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Morrisville

Once again Trudy Rubin nails it in her recent column about West Bank violence by Israeli settlers. When I read, “Far-right extremists are even encouraging Jewish-Arab violence atop the Temple Mount,” which also houses Islam’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, I flashed back to the Second Intifada when Ariel Sharon took a purposely provocative stroll on the Temple Mount on Sept. 28, 2000, just before Rosh Hashanah and less than two weeks before Yom Kippur, upsetting the clear understanding obtained between Israel and the Palestinians. It ignited exactly what the Israeli extremist right hoped for — a violent Palestinian reaction that inflamed the nascent Second Intifada.

I was then a pulpit rabbi in Manhattan. Less than two weeks later, I began my Yom Kippur eve sermon: “Our tradition says that God desires not sacrifices, but rather a broken heart. I speak tonight, Kol Nidre, 5761 [2000] with a broken heart, and I suspect that many of your hearts are breaking as well, as once more we see dreams of peace, always so fragile, shattered by violence and hatred.”

In that same sermon, I stated: “Those who believe in violence and feed on hatred and distrust are prevailing. Make no mistake: The issue is not properly framed as Israeli vs. Palestinian or Jew vs. Arab/Muslim. The issue ought to be framed as those who wage violence vs. those who wage peace … If peace is to have a chance, then Palestinians and Israelis alike will have to reframe their conflict once and for all. Those who wage peace must unite and expose the unholy alliance of those who wage violence and hatred. It must be understood, finally, that Hamas and Hezbollah are followers of Baruch Goldstein [extremist Israeli mass murderer of Palestinians engaged in worship] and Yigal Amir [Israeli extremist assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin], and that Goldstein and Amir are members of Hamas and Hezbollah.”

And so we come to our day. On Oct. 7, 2023, the parents of Israeli peace activist Maoz Inon were slaughtered by Palestinian followers of Hamas in the most violent day Jews have endured since the Holocaust. In their book, The Future is Peace: A Shared Journey Across the Holy Land, which Inon wrote with his partner in peace, the Palestinian Muslim Aziz Abu Sarah, Maoz writes, “As far as I was concerned, the Israeli government and Hamas were two sides of the same coin; both were accountable for the deaths of my parents.” It is the same tragic story, and it is time for it to end.

It is time. It is time for the wagers of peace to unite in solidarity and opposition to the wagers of war. It is time. It is past time.

Rabbi Avi Winokur, rabbi emeritus, Society Hill Synagogue, Philadelphia

The recent article about how the number of Amazon workers enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid in 2025 has tripled since 2020 needed a better title. Perhaps, “Taxpayers pay Amazon workers while Amazon stockholders increase their fortunes by using cheap labor.”

This system is not sustainable. We see cutbacks to benefits happening already.

Austerity for (almost) everyone is coming unless voters elect politicians who fight like hell to make the rich pay more taxes, like they did before Ronald Reagan lowered the max rate from 78% to 38%.

Joe Mikuliak, Philadelphia

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