Measles cases in the U.S. have been on the rise since 2019, and Texas' ongoing outbreak is the state's largest in nearly 30 years.
It began in a Mennonite community and now stretches across multiple counties.
Dr. Clifford Porter MD PhD, senior fellow for healthcare at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, says a variety of communities throughout history, both religious and non-religious, have been and are against vaccines.
"They get occasional outbreaks of these childhood diseases that are usually essentially eliminated with vaccines," he notes, adding that "isolated communities that haven't had measles outbreaks in … years – it didn't just spontaneously show up. It came from somewhere."
He points out that international travel, including illegal immigration, can cause infections of all kinds, and local health officials are searching for the origin of this outbreak.
Texas' decreasing vaccination rates and lack of official response have been blamed. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has also been criticized for "downplaying" or "minimizing" the situation, especially since a child who had been hospitalized for the measles passed away last week.
Few details other than his or her vaccination status have been given, and Dr. Porter notes that more people have begun questioning vaccines in recent years.
"Public health officials during COVID, the leadership of it did such a poor job explaining vaccines," he tells AFN. "Demanding vaccines being given to children for COVID really was not medically necessary, unless they are high risk. Measles is a very different animal … because it can affect all population ages, just like the flu."
Kennedy has pointed out that due to improvements in healthcare and nutrition, measles infections began to decline before the vaccine was introduced in 1963, and with or without the vaccine, the survival rate of the highly contagious disease was and is very high.
In developed countries, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports the mortality rate is typically around 0.1-0.2%.
Kennedy does not explicitly recommend the vaccine but encourages parents to consult with healthcare providers "to understand their options to get the MMR vaccine" for their children. "The decision to vaccinate is a personal one," he says.
No single-dose measles vaccine is available in the United States; it is typically administered with those for mumps and rubella.
Dr. Porter says the vaccinated can still get measles, but the vaccine can lower the infection's severity. He recommends those who got the MMR shot before 1990 get a booster, and he strongly encourages parents to vaccinate their children.
