Editor: Another Measles outbreak in the United States. Get ready for once eradicated diseases to return. 😑
I just want to let readers know that hearing things like this makes me beyond angry. If there’s one thing I thought might cause me to have a psychotic break during COVID, it wasn’t the isolation, it was the irresponsible people in our government and on conservative media who were telling people not to wear a mask—in fact, “walk up to people who are wearing a mask and rip it off their face.”
And if you see children wearing masks, “call child protective services because it’s child abuse.” Tucker Carlson said both of those things when he had his show on Fox News. I don’t think I even have to list the reasons why that made me angry (and crazy). Those same irresponsible people were telling anyone listening who trusted them not to get vaccinated or social distance or do anything to protect and save their lives.
All of that being said, I get angry at anti-vaxxers for the same reasons. If you don’t want to vaccinate your child in order to protect them as well as other children around them, then homeschool your kids.
This story is hitting a nerve because an unvaccinated child spread measles in the waiting room of a pediatrician’s office that killed a baby who was still too young to get the vaccine. (No links or sources, I apologize, but if I remember I will come back and add it.
Anyone who is in power or in a position of authority and intentionally misleads people about important health matters is a special kind of evil.
Now, I don’t think the moms in the anti-vax Facebook group are doing it intentionally, I think they’ve either read misleading information online or the people in authority from above have duped them. Here is the story on the Texas measles outbreak from KFF Health News.
Anti-vax laws, another deadly side effect of Republicans (that would be my title.)
In late January, two school-age children from Gaines County were hospitalized with measles. Since an estimated 1 in 5 people with the disease end up in the hospital, the two cases suggested a larger outbreak.
As of Feb. 7, there were nine confirmed and three probable cases, said Zach Holbrooks, executive director of the South Plains Public Health District, which includes Gaines. The department is investigating many other potential cases among close contacts, he said, in hopes of treating people quickly and curbing the spread of the virus.
Public health practitioners warn such outbreaks will become more common because of scores of laws around the U.S. — pending and passed — that ultimately lower vaccine rates. Many of the measures allow parents to more easily exempt their children from school vaccine requirements, and a swell of vaccine misinformation has led to record rates of exemptions.
As Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the most influential purveyors of dangerous vaccine misinformation, prepares to take the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services, researchers say such bills have a higher chance of passing and that more parents will refuse vaccines because of false information spread at the highest levels of government.
“Mr. Kennedy has been an opponent of many health-protecting and life-saving vaccines, such as those that prevent measles and polio,” scores of Nobel Prize laureates wrote in a letter to the Senate. Having him head HHS, they wrote, “would put the public’s health in jeopardy.”
Most people who aren’t protected by vaccination will get measles if exposed. Gaines County has one of the lowest rates of childhood vaccination in Texas. At a local public school district in the community of Loop, only 46% of kindergarten students have gotten vaccines against measles, mumps, and rubella. Vaccination rates may be even lower at private schools and within homeschool groups, which don’t always report the information.
Holbrooks’ team is scrambling to track transmission, ensure that kids and babies seek prompt care, and offer measles vaccines to anyone who hasn’t yet gotten them.
“We are going to see more kids infected. We will see more families taking time off from work. More kids in the hospital,” said Rekha Lakshmanan, chief strategy officer for The Immunization Partnership in Houston, a nonprofit that advocates for vaccine access. “This is the tip of the iceberg.”
As a rule, at least 95% of people need to be vaccinated against measles for a community to be well protected. That threshold is high enough to protect infants too young for the vaccine, people who can’t take the vaccine for medical reasons, and anyone who doesn’t mount a strong, lasting immune response to it.
Measles is extremely contagious, so health workers preemptively treated infants too young to be vaccinated who had shared the emergency room with children later diagnosed with the virus, said Katherine Wells, public health director in Lubbock, Texas. Some children from Gaines were hospitalized in that county. The disease can cause severe complications, and about one of every thousand children with measles die.
An outbreak among a largely unvaccinated population in Samoa in 2019 and 2020 caused 83 deaths, mainly among children, and more than 5,700 cases. Kennedy, who peddles misinformation about measles vaccines, had visited the island earlier on a trip arranged by a Samoan anti-vaccine influencer, according to a 2021 blog post by Kennedy.
Without evidence, Kennedy cast doubt on the fact that measles caused the tragedy in Samoa. “We don’t know what was killing them,” he said at his first confirmation hearing. Samoa’s top health official denounced this evasion as “a complete lie,” in an interview with The Associated Press.
Last school year, the number of kindergartners exempted from a vaccinerequirement — 3.3% — was higher than ever reported before, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Numbers were far higher than that in Gaines County, where nearly 1 in 5 children in kindergarten had a vaccine exemption for philosophical or religious reasons in 2023-24.
Over the past couple of years, several states have allowed more parents to obtain exemptions. Already, about 25 bills have been filed in the 2025 Texas legislative session that could limit vaccination in various ways.
“We’re seeing a level of momentum this legislative session that we’ve never seen in the past,” Lakshaman said. Changes are afoot at the local level, too. For example, a school board in the Houston area voted to remove references to vaccines in its curriculum. “There is a top-down and bottom-up assault on these protections,” Lakshaman said.
About 80% of the public believes that the benefits of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines outweigh the risks, according to a 2025 KFF poll.
“Lawmakers who put forth dangerous policies need to know the people they hear from don’t represent the majority,” Lakshaman said. Her group offers resources on its website to help people influence decisions on vaccination policies.
[Update: This article was updated at 10:36 a.m. ET on Feb. 7, 2025, to reflect news developments.]
Excerpts or more from this article, originally published on KFF Health News appear in this post. Republished, with permission, under a Creative Commons License.
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