Globally, humans have only fully eradicated two diseases, one of which few have even heard of: smallpox and rinderpest, which affected livestock. Various countries have been more successful at “elimination” of disease — like what the US accomplished with measles in 2000, when “the absence of the continuous spread of disease was greater than 12 months.” And now, 25 years later, this:
With the CDC’s latest update on Wednesday, the US has now set a new record for post-elimination yearly cases of measles, at 1,288. It is, for the record, July 9. This breaks 2019’s record of 1,274, and is the most in 33 years at the tail end of the pre-MMR vaccine era.
Those cases have been found in 38 states, officially stemming from 27 disparate outbreaks. Texas has had by far the most, at over 700 cases; no other state has crossed the 100-case threshold yet. And since people may have forgotten, measles is not a harmless infection: 13 percent of the cases so far in the US have resulted in hospitalization, and three people have died. It is worse for the youngest out there: of 368 cases in children under five years old, 21 percent have ended up in the hospital.
The disease is primarily spreading, of course, in the growing cadre of unvaccinated people. Fully 92 percent of the cases this year have occurred in people who are unvaccinated or whose vaccination status is not known; four percent affected people who had received one MMR dose, and four percent hit those who had received two doses. The CDC’s update specifically notes that MMR coverage among kindergarteners has now fallen below the 95 percent coverage target — “much lower in some communities” — and continues to decrease.
That’s the CDC that is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, run by the nation’s premier anti-vax ghoul, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Though the falling MMR coverage rates predate his tenure — at HHS, that is; he spent plenty of time before that out in the world bad-mouthing vaccines in other capacities — there is no question that he has been trying to accelerate it further. He questions vaccine safety and efficacy publicly at every chance, and recently fired the entire CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and replaced its members with a cadre of like-minded anti-scientific weirdos. They promptly announced a reconsideration of the childhood immunization schedule that, if followed, saves millions of children’s lives.
Looking back at the country’s history with measles, the CDC’s Wednesday update noted: “Achieving measles elimination status in the United States was a historic public health achievement.” As it now appears to be circulating inside this country just fine, the anti-vax movement and its leathery avatar at HHS are helping relegate that “historic” milestone to the dustbin of history.
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