In its weekly update today, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported 66 more measles cases, pushing the national total to 1,001 and in just over 4 months keeps the nation on track to pass the 2019 total, which marked the nation's worst year since the disease was declared to be eliminated in 2000.
According to the CDC, the measles outbreak in West Texas and surrounding states is now the largest single outbreak in the United States since elimination. With over 750 confirmed cases, it now surpassed the New York City outbreak in 2019, which had 697 cases.
Katherine Wells, the Public Health Director in Lubbock, Texas, near the epicenter of the outbreak, has been an epidemiologist for over 25 years; and until January, she had never seen a case of measles. She spoke with Tradeoffs, a healthcare reporting site, this week, describing the frustrations with battling a disease, that was considered eradicated in the U.S., as well as battling anti-vaccine advocates who have flooded the region in recent weeks with their conspiracy theories and misinformation.
"They are moving ten times the speed we are," Wells told Tradeoffs when we caught up with her to talk about her experiences. Those false messages not only undermine the public's confidence in vaccines, she said, they sow distrust in public health more broadly. "It is definitely a challenge. I almost call it a misinformation machine. … It’s just hard to keep up with the messaging." She discusses how the Children's Health Defense (organization founded by RFK Jr) people came into town, talking with the parents of the two children who died, continuing to peddle their debunked treatments, giving false hope to the community. "Being healthy — or taking these supplements — is not going to prevent your child from getting measles. And we don’t know which child is going to have severe complications from measles. We don’t know who’s going to end up in the hospital and we don’t know, unfortunately, which child may die."
The challenge, for her, is getting the community to trust the vaccine, and trust healthcare providers. There is a disconnect with many in the community, about getting an injection when you are not sick to prevent illness; an illness that they know has never been in the community., falsely believing that the disease does not exist, or that the vaccine itself causes the disease. "I’ve talked to a lot of parents that have said, 'Well, we never had measles or polio or mumps in our community. So why, even if the risk for vaccines is so minuscule, why even take that risk if that disease doesn’t exist?'"
According to Wells, they are getting through to people, it's just a slow process. She remembers a mother of 5 who had never vaccinated her children before, come in and have a conversation with one of her nurses, and ended up getting all 5 children vaccinated against measles with the MMR. "She’s just one of many parents that are now coming into the public health department — because we are that trusted messenger — to get the vaccine. … It’s uplifting."
With the abrupt loss of federal public health funding in March, Wells' is working on a deficit at both the city and state levels. And Wells said, "countering the misinformation takes money". However, she is not giving up. "We can't let that noise disrupt what we need to do," she said. "We still need to focus on our community. We need to get vaccines in arms, even if that takes having one-on-one conversations with individuals."
"I still have some hope for all of this. There are 2,000 other health department directors out here, in the United States, who do this work day in and day out. And public health really happens on that local level – with individuals who know their community and want to make their community a better place."
Listen to the full interview with Katherine Wells, here.
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