Measles outbreak is scarier than it looks

The news that an outbreak in Texas has caused the nation’s first confirmed measles death in a decade — an unvaccinated child — is as unsurprising as it is tragic. Spreading largely in rural Mennonite communities that typically have low vaccination rates, the outbreak has already grown to at least 146 cases since late January. Almost all of them are children. Parents whose children got infected but survived are no doubt grateful that their family was spared. But startling research about the virus unfortunately tells a new and very different story, recasting what was previously known about how measles works and making clear why the Trump administration’s approach to vaccines is nowhere even close to meeting the moment.

That research, conducted over the past decade by immunologist Dr. Michael Mina and others, revealed that measles destroys immune cells. Even people who recover from the virus lose much of their immune memory, and therefore the protection they had acquired from prior infections or vaccines to all the other childhood illnesses. This leaves survivors more vulnerable to many other diseases for years afterward. Worse, these victims may now face those childhood diseases, to which they lost immune protections, as older children, which puts them more at risk for complications. Before vaccines were introduced, Mina told me, earlier measles infections may have been implicated in as many as half of all childhood deaths from all infectious diseases. Which, given these findings, would mean the true harm of measles is far greater than its death toll, and the legacy of this outbreak may still be felt years after it’s officially contained.

A newly circulating virus would mean some unvaccinated people would encounter measles for the first time in adulthood, when the danger it poses is much higher. This effect was evident in World War I, when healthy young conscripts from rural areas had their first exposure to the disease in Army training camps. The result was the worst outbreak the military had seen in almost a century. Thousands of soldiers died.

During Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings for health secretary, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., practically begged him to acknowledge, however grudgingly, that vaccines don’t cause autism. It was the easiest layup ever, but Kennedy just wouldn’t go there. Maybe not so surprising, given that he had previously told a podcaster that he considers it his duty to tell random strangers that they shouldn’t vaccinate their babies. Cassidy, a medical doctor by training, voted to confirm him anyway.

The situation in Texas may be the wake-up call that gets some holdouts to bring their children to the doctor and request the protection they need and deserve. In 2015, when an unvaccinated 6-year-old died a horrible, prolonged death from the “strangulation disease” of diphtheria, the distraught parents vaccinated their surviving child, while lamenting they’d been conned by anti-vaxxers.

All governors should be launching campaigns to increase measles vaccination coverage, but some states are led by people who promote falsehoods. And some Americans live deep in echo chambers where most of what they hear about vaccines are lies and disdain. It won’t be possible to reverse all this quickly. Perhaps the best we can do is inform parents skeptical of vaccines what they’re risking, before it’s too late.