Everything Starts In Texas

 Vaccine exemptions were a bad idea? Who knew?

With its measles outbreak spreading to two additional states, Texas is on track to becoming the cause of a national epidemic if it doesn’t start vaccinating more people, according to public health experts.

Measles, a highly contagious disease that was declared eliminated from the U.S. in 2000, has made a resurgence in West Texas communities, jumping hundreds of miles to the northern border of the Panhandle and East Texas, and invading bordering states of New Mexico and Oklahoma.

Based on the rapid spread of cases statewide — more than 200 over 50 days — public health officials predict that it could take Texas a year to contain the spread. With cases continuously rising and the rest of the country’s unvaccinated population at the outbreak’s mercy, Texas must create stricter quarantine requirements, increase the vaccine rate, and improve contact tracing to address this measles epidemic before it becomes a nationwide problem, warn infectious disease experts and officials in other states.

“This demonstrates that this (vaccine exemption) policy puts the community, the county, and surrounding states at risk because of how contagious this disease is,” said Glenn Fennelly, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases and assistant vice president of global health at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso. “We are running the risk of threatening global stability.”

Just tryin’ to help Trump out, right, Greg? Well, Trump and RFK, Jr.

This is a very multi-jurisdictional outbreak with three states involved and about seven or eight different local health departments, in addition to some areas where the state serves as the local health department. There are a lot of moving parts,” said Katherine Wells, director of public health for the City of Lubbock, during a Tuesday meeting of the Big Cities Health Coalition, a national organization for large metropolitan health departments.

Most of Texas’ measles cases are in unvaccinated school-aged children and are concentrated in the Mennonite community in Gaines County, which traditionally has low vaccination rates.

Wells said efforts to increase the vaccination rates in Gaines County, which is about 70 miles from Lubbock, and the surrounding region have been slow as trust in the government has seemingly reached an all-time low.

“We are seeing, just like the rest of Americans, this community has seen a lot of stories about vaccines causing autism, and that is leading to a lot of this vaccine hesitancy, not religion,” she said.

No, this is not going to get any better.

Since 2018, the number of requests to the Texas Department of State Health Services for an exemption form has doubled from 45,900 to more than 93,000 in 2024.

Data suggests that vaccine exemptions and those living in areas with higher vaccine exemption rates for measles and pertussis are at increased risk of contracting these diseases. The authors of this data collection concluded that “geographic pockets of vaccine exemptions pose a risk to the whole community.”

Fennelly said the hurdles to obtaining exemptions are easy to clear, leading to an increasing number of people refusing the vaccine.

State lawmakers this session have filed more than a dozen bills that would strengthen or expand vaccine exemptions.

“We don’t have the capacity in Texas to deal with so many sick children if this continues to spread. We are already at our limit with seasonal influenza and respiratory syncytial virus. Our doctors are at their limit,” Fennelly said.

This is Texas! WALK IT OFF!! No, really.

Texas has held multiple vaccination clinics in the outbreak area, but according to the Texas Department of State Health Services, only 350 doses have been administered.