from the we-chose-this dept
We haven’t talked about the numbers in America’s measles outbreak in a couple of months, but that certainly doesn’t mean the problem has gone away. It was back in April that we wrote about how the numbers were on pace to eclipse the outbreak in 2019, which was largely driven by unvaccinated religious groups in New York State, in large part due to both the long-term advocacy against vaccination by people like RFK Jr. and his short-term time as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The result is likely to be the loss of elimination status of the disease in America, thanks to Kennedy’s staff and budget cuts, his crackpot theories about how to treat the disease, and his desire to blame the victims of the disease, casting them as undesirables of a kind.
Well, these assbags did it: America’s measles case count has continued to climb and has now eclipsed the 2019 numbers, becoming the highest count in a year in over three decades.
Over the weekend, the tally of measles cases reached 1,281, setting a new case record since the highly contagious viral disease was declared eliminated from the country in 2000. The previous record was set in 2019, when there were 1,274 cases and officials warned that the US had narrowly avoided losing the elimination status.
Overall, the current case tally is a 33-year high for the preventable infection, and the outlook for the country is bleak. Vaccination rates have only fallen since the pandemic, and the top health official in the country—Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—is an unswerving anti-vaccine activist who has spent his short time in the position so far spreading dangerous misinformation about the measles vaccine—as well as peddling unproven treatments and downplaying the infection.
We are now more likely than not to lose the elimination status of measles in America. I’ll remind you that we’re only roughly half a year into this. While the infection rates thankfully don’t seem to be accelerating (yet), they also aren’t slowing down appreciably. And that is because, thanks to Kennedy and his fellow anti-vaxx advocates, many parts of America don’t have the 95% immunity status required for true herd immunity. Because people aren’t vaccinating themselves and their children. And, yes, it really is that simple.
The elimination of the disease in America was a massive undertaking by the federal government to make the MMR vaccine available and to campaign among the public for its adoption. The highest healthcare official in the land currently, however, is doing the opposite of that. He’s removing vaccination schedules from some Americans and growling nearly constantly about his own vaccine skepticism.
And if you think that Texas is the limit of the problem, you’re wrong.
Such is the case in Gaines County, Texas, where the largest outbreak this year has erupted. So far, that outbreak, which spans four states, accounts for at least 950 of the country’s 1,281 cases.
But, overall, there have been a whopping 27 outbreaks in the country just in the first six months. According to national data compiled by researchers at Yale School of Public Health, as of July 6, the 1,281 cases are across 39 states, with around 90 percent of the cases associated with one of the outbreaks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also reports a national measles case count but only updates its numbers on Wednesdays. According to the CDC’s latest data, at least 155 people have been hospitalized for the infection, and three people have died—two otherwise healthy young children in Texas and one adult in New Mexico. All three deaths were in people who were not vaccinated.
We’re fortunate that we haven’t seen the death toll from this administration’s incompetence rise in several months… but that is unlikely to last. This disease kills. And it doesn’t even just kill directly, but tangentially as well, due to measles having a particularly insidious side effect of immunization amnesia for other diseases. That means getting infected with measles removes protections you might have for other diseases.
It is time for RFK Jr. to go. Quickly. Or this is going to keep getting worse.
Filed Under: health and human services, measles, rfk jr.
