This editorial was originally published by The St. Louis Post Dispatch and was distributed by The Associated Press.
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Bearing in mind that any child’s death is a tragedy, many American media consumers could nonetheless be forgiven for wondering about the proportionality of national news coverage regarding the death of a single Texas child from measles.
In fact, the outsized attention to the unvaccinated child’s death is merited by the context: It is the first U.S. fatality in 10 years from a disease that was declared effectively eradicated here as of 2020 — but has been making a comeback in the past few years, tracking with increased and unmerited public distrust of vaccinations.
What would make this fully preventable death even more tragic is if the warning it offers to other parents around the country about the value of childhood vaccines continues to be ignored by too many of them. Every epidemic in history starts with “just one,” after all.
The Lubbock death, officials say, is part of a measles outbreak in rural West Texas that is apparently centered on an undervaccinated Mennonite community. But it isn’t just religious belief anymore that drives increasing anti-vaccination sentiment. The growth of libertarian-leaning politics that encourages both healthy and less-than-healthy skepticism of societal institutions such as government and medicine has depressed vaccination rates and increased outbreaks around the country.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that vaccination rates nationally have dropped from more than 95% in 2019 to under 93% today. That sounds like a small drop and still-impressive vaccination rate, but for two factors: One, a 95% percent vaccination rate is considered the minimum necessary to provide herd immunity to a given community; and, two, the national average hides wide variations by local and state populations.
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In the West Texas community where the current outbreak is centered, close to 20% of the population is unvaccinated; in Missouri, it’s close to 10%, almost double the statewide non-vaccinated rate of just five years earlier. In St. Louis, roughly 1 in 4 kids aren’t vaccinated.
The anti-vax trend actually began about a decade ago but appears to have grown worse following the 2020 COVID pandemic. Undoubtedly, the medical and political handling of that once-in-a-century crisis wasn’t flawless. But what started as understandable public skepticism about unfamiliar COVID vaccines and unusually aggressive public policies has seemingly fueled a wider distrust toward even long-proven vaccines that have saved countless lives from measles, mumps, polio and other diseases for generations.
The results of this still small but growing rejection of medical science is undeniable: Measles outbreaks, generally limited to a few dozen cases a year nationally for the first decade of this century, approached 300 last year, the highest number since the pandemic.
Newly installed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had no direct role in the Texas outbreak that claimed the child’s life. But RFK Jr.’s irresponsible public reaction to it has validated the warnings about allowing the nation’s top vaccination skeptic from being put in charge of the federal government’s top health agency.
In an almost eerie echo of Kennedy’s blithe dismissal of a deadly measles outbreak in Samoa that erupted after he visited there and fueled local reluctance toward vaccination (“mild,” Kennedy characterized the epidemic that caused more than 80 deaths), he downplayed the seriousness of the Texas outbreak as “not unusual”: “You have measles outbreaks every year.”
That’s only been true in the past few years — the period during which Kennedy and his anti-vax movement have battered the public’s trust in these inherently trustworthy vaccines.
It says much about the current political era that, for America to reclaim its earlier success at virtually eliminating these dangerous diseases, it must ignore the damaging disinformation coming from its (medically untrained) top health official and the toxic movement he embodies, and start listening to their own doctors again. There is a family in West Texas right now that will be forever haunted by its tragic failure to do that.
