North Texas is seeing a breakout of measles as the U.S. Senate questions President Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a notorious anti-vaccination advocate.
On January 23, the Texas Department of State Health Services issued an alert confirming two cases of measles in Harris County area. The carriers were unvaccinated adults. That number has since risen to four, thanks to new cases in the Lubbock area that led to the hospitalization of two children. These are the first cases of measles in the state in two years.
The outbreak comes as the Senate debates whether to confirm Kennedy, who has been questioned harshly on his anti-vaccination stance in the past and whether that makes him unfit to run the nation’s largest government health service. In 2018, Kennedy used the death of two infants from improperly mixed vaccinations to advise the Prime Minister of Samoa on the danger of vaccines. Samoa saw an outbreak of measles the next year that killed more than 80 people, including children.
Many anti-vaccination advocates claim that measles is a mild disease that does not require vaccination to protect people from. It is, instead, a highly infectious respiratory illness that spreads rapidly and killed over 100,000 people in 2023 alone. Despite the fact that a safe and effective vaccine for measles has been available since 1963 and has prevented 60 million deaths in the 21st Century, vaccination rates have dropped thanks to widespread misinformation. This includes a now retracted study claiming a link between autism and the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine by British doctor Andrew Wakefield, who fabricated results while trying to patent and sell his own alternative to the vaccine. Wakefield subsequently lost his license to practice medicine.
However, his work empowered the growing anti-vaccine movement, including raising Kennedy’s profile. Kennedy denied being anti-vaccination during his contentious hearings but was grilled by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) about children’s onesies with anti-vaccination messages sold on the website for the Children’s Health Defense, which Kennedy co-founded. When Kennedy asked to see more evidence on vaccine safety during a Friday hearing, he immediately dismissed evidence presented to him by Senator Bill Cassidey (R-Louisiana).
As of now, the outbreak of measles in Texas is moderate, but the disease is known for its incredible virality and ability to spread quickly. Vaccination rates in the state have dropped from 97 percent to 94.3 percent in 2023.That may not sound like much, but falls just below the threshold for necessary herd immunity (95 percent) according to the Mayo Clinic. When herd immunity is achieved, the virus has nowhere to go and dies without infecting a new host. Texas has been battling large scale vaccine misinformation for decades, a problem that was exacerbated by the politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic. A measles outbreak among an increasingly unvaccinated populace has the potential to spread quickly and fatally, and the problem could be made exponentially worse if a dedicated anti-vaccine advocate helms the federal department overseeing health.
