The measles outbreak in West Texas didn’t happen just by chance.
The easily preventable disease, declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, ripped through communities sprawling across more than 20 Texas counties in part because health departments were starved of the funding needed to run vaccine programs, officials say.
“We haven’t had a strong immunization program that can really do a lot of boots-on-the-ground work for years,” said Katherine Wells, the health director in Lubbock, a 90-minute drive from the outbreak’s epicenter.
Immunization programs nationwide have been left brittle by years of stagnant funding by federal, state and local governments. In Texas and elsewhere, this helped set the stage for the measles outbreak and fueled its spread. Now cuts to federal funding threaten efforts to prevent more cases and outbreaks.
Health departments got an influx of cash to deal with COVID-19, but it wasn’t enough to make up for years of neglect. On top of that, trust in vaccines has eroded. Health officials warn the situation is primed to get worse.
Recent cuts by the Trump administration have pulled billions of dollars in COVID-19 related funding — $2 billion of it slated for immunization programs for various diseases. Overseeing the cuts is Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who rose to prominence leading an anti-vaccine movement. While Kennedy has said he wants his agency to prevent future outbreaks, he’s also declined to deliver a consistent and forceful message that would help do so — encouraging people to vaccinate their children against measles while reminding them it is safe.
Congress could have just said no to putting the anti-vax nut in charge of health. How hard was that? During the interview he said everything he could to demonstrate how unfit he was for the job and they still hired him.
The vote was straight down party lines.
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1191/vote_119_1_00052.htm
With the current regime, what seems to a resonable person to show how unfit he was for the job, was to the stakeholder exactly what they wanted.
Is it too much to hope congress get the measles
The people in power are all vaccinated. Even when they say they aren’t. The goal of the MAGA is to create so much confusion and distraction that you don’t actually know what they’re doing.
They all have ridiculously good healthcare, so, as is tradition, they won’t be affected by their own choices.
Speaking as someone in central texas, living not that far from the outbreak… It’s bad, but not that big a deal.
Most everyone outside super-religious communes has the vaccine, whether they like it or not. Basically everyone who’s died or been infected so far was unvaccinated. See figure 4:
https://www.dshs.texas.gov/news-alerts/measles-outbreak-2025
The message is for the next pandemic we aren’t vaccinated for. The meme that vaccines are a ‘choice’ with tradeoffs one should carefully consider (instead of something you’d be an idiot not to get) are going to obliterate us next time. That message is coming from the top, not from where this funding was cut.
Looks like donvict wants to beat his earlier record for killing more Americans than any other…
The Most Felonious Donvict!!!
I want to say they deserve this, but it’s children who will suffer the most because their parents fucked around during biology classes and didn’t learn shit.
Stupidity is exploding at an even faster rate.
