In Wake of Continued Measles Outbreak, U.S. Health Officials Consider Air Travel Ban
Ahead of the upcoming school break, summer camps demand vaccinations.
As measles cases in the country rise to the highest level in over two decades, health officials have weighed a travel ban that would prohibit those believed infected with the disease from flying.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 60 new individual instances of measles in Monday’s update, bringing this year’s tally to 940. It’s the largest total since 1994, falling just short of the 963 cases reported that year.
Efforts to fight off a disease that has spread to 26 states have led state and local officials to consider requesting the imposition of a rarely used travel ban on infectious passengers, The Washington Post reported.
Eight people from five states were warned the federal government could put them on a Do Not Board list managed by the CDC, and they canceled their travel plans, the newspaper said.
Such tactics may strike some as heavy-handed, but they have been validated through decades of case law, said Mark Ustin, head of the health care compliance and lobbying practices at the New York law firm Farrell Fritz.
In fact, officials in New York worked with federal authorities to prevent two people exposed to measles from traveling by air in an attempt to contain the spread of the disease.
The unidentified people are among eight throughout the country who have voluntarily canceled travel plans in lieu of being placed on a rarely used federal list maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that would bar them from boarding flights, according to a report in the Washington Post.
The current outbreak of the virus has its roots in air travel.
Several travelers came to the United States legally from Israel, where there are outbreaks of the virus, and visited ultra-Orthodox communities where there is an aversion to vaccinations.
“That’s how we started here,” said Ed Day, the Rockland County executive. “They came in legitimately through the front door.
And as parents make summer camp plans, many have learned that facilities now mandate vaccinations before accepting applications.
Officials say people who may spread measles can be placed on a “do not board” list that will prevent them from flying, and summer camps are insisting that campers and staff be properly vaccinated, CBS2’s Tony Aiello reported Tuesday.
Scott Rosmarin’s family has run an Orange County day camp for 70 years. This summer, every camper will be required to provide proof they’ve been vaccinated for measles, with no exemptions.
“I had accepted some kids in the past that had medical and religious exemptions and I just felt I wasn’t gonna do it. I want to put the other parents at ease and let them know all the kids in camp are gonna be vaccinated,” Rosmarin said.
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Two thoughts always come to mind with this measles issue, or any of the diseases which there are vaccines against them.
1. If the vaccines are effective, and despite the hype, most parents do have their children vaccinated, then why is there an outbreak? I find it hard to believe that large communities have that many children who are not vaccinated against the disease, so is the vaccine not working as we are told it would?
2. Many of the illegal immigrants coming in to this country do not have the vaccinations, and are likely the main cause of the outbreak through these communities. Yet despite knowing this, our leftists still push open borders. Disease, crime, harm to our economy, harm to our states for the high costs of allowing them to be here, harm to the lower wage workers who are still undercut by the illegals who work for low wage and no benefits.
What a country. 🙁
The CDC states that the 2-dose vaccine is 97% effective and the 1-dose vaccine is 93% effective. https://www.cdc.gov/measles/vaccination.html
So, even if you get the vaccines, there is still a 3-7% chance that you could get the disease.
You can have a lab test to determine your immunity level. I had the test since I was sick with measles and never got the vaccines. It may have been an unnecessary test,but it helped to reassure me about possible exposure.
On your second point, my mother had to pass the health test coming into America after WWII. But, that was then…
That is just not true. First of all, the vaccination rate in the source countries for most illegal immigrants is high. Second, the outbreaks are not happening where they are.
For review of rates by country as reported by UNCIEF. Halfway down the page, there is an option to download the immunization rate by antigen by region/country. One can download into a excel file or as a pdf.
https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-health/immunization/
While the rates are good for Canada and Mexico, there have been reports on the news/internet that the border patrol are stopping people from many different countries/continents.
Hawaiian judge to issue irresponsible, nationwide, immediate injunction in 4, 3, 2,…
I’ll say this one more time, this measles response is all a SCAM.
In the first place, this is hardly an epidemic; only about 1000 cases have been reported. That is statistically ZERO, in a population of 325 MILLION people.
In the second place, measles is hardly considered a DEADLY disease. It is even less dangerous today, given the state of modern medicine.
Third, if the efficacy rate is accurate, between the number of people vaccinated and the number of people who have immunity from exposure to wild measles, we should have an immunity level of around 95 percent of the population of the US. This well beyond the threshold for “herd immunity”, as theorized. So, exactly what is the problem? According to that theory, we should not see any cases of measles, among the US population? Could it be that the theory is BS? Could it be that the stated efficacy rate for the measles vaccine is greater than it actually is? Could it be that the measles vaccine does NOT impart life long, or even long term immunity, as advertised?
There is a reason for the measles scare program and it has to do with money, power or both.
I have an aunt who had measles when she was pregnant. Her son is about 56 now, and has been institutionalized for decades. He can talk and make jokes, but has never been competent to live on his own.
That is why we have measles vaccines.
What is your POINT???? Don’t you get it???? IF you are vaccinated, as suggested by the CDC, YOU shouldn’t CONTRACT MEASLES. I do not know how many time I have to REPEAT that. The WHOLE POINT of vaccination is for the person vaccinated to be IMMUNE to the disease.
If your aunt had been immunized, then she would not have contracted measles while she was pregnant.
Please join us in the real woirld.
“The MMR vaccine is very safe and effective. Two doses of MMR vaccine are about 97% effective at preventing measles; one dose is about 93% effective.”
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/vaccination.html
The way I read this statement from the CDC, the vaccine is NOT 100% effective. There is still a chance, remote, but a chance.
And, someone who is 56 would have been born in 1963, which is when the measles vaccine was introduced. So, the vaccine may not have been available to the person due to production limitations. Or if she was already pregnant, she may have been advised not to have the vaccine.
You make Valerie’s illustration ev en worse and strengthen MY point.
In today’s society, we have an effective measles vaccine, at least in the short term. We have a 91% immunization rate in the US. We have considerably better medical care and access to that care than we did 50 years ago. Measles is NOT a serious disease today, even if a person contracts the disease. Deaths from measles, in the US, is essentially zero.
So, why the big reaction to an extra 500 measles cases, nationwide?
Mac – I took Valerie’s comment about her aunt and adult son to show that before the measles vaccine was common, there were some severe complications that impacted the quality of life.
A disease may not have a high fatality rate because of improved medical care, but the complications can be expensive and have a long term impact. Add into the conversation the consideration that measles has not been an active concern in the US for many years, so how many doctors, PAs, nurse practitioners, nurses, etc, have seen an case of measles?
Girls in my neighborhood attended “mumps parties”, maybe also for measles, to get it done with before they would become pregnant. When one neighborhood kid came down with such a disease, girls from the neighborhood would be invited over to get it.
It’s unfortunate that this did not happen with your aunt.
All of these childhood diseases are far more serious in adults. I am not an anti vaccer but I sometimes worry that people getting the vaccines don’t develop a natural immunity and are vulnerable should they not get their booster shots from time to time.
“Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) is a very rare, but fatal disease of the central nervous system that results from a measles virus infection acquired earlier in life.” So there is another reason to be vaccinated.
Same thing with chickenpox. The disease can reactivate in older adults (when their immune system starts waning) and manifest as shingles. Shingle sufferers can also spread the virus to the unvaccinated.
Having these diseases does not confer life time immunity as they can both reactivate later. While the vaccinations may not be 100% effective, they generally reduce the severity of the diseases and more importantly they are amenable to vaccine induced herd immunity that protects the very young, the very old and the ill and weak.
By the way, even chickenpox can be fatal. Rarely, but it happens. I know someone whose daughter died of it.
Valerie, did your aunt have measles or German measles during pregnancy? This is the reason I ask: Literature on the topic indicates that it’s the German measles (rubella) that carry a high risk of complications during pregnancy, rather than “regular” measles (rubeola), and this is what I also remember hearing about when I was a kid.
See: https://www.whattoexpect.com/pregnancy/pregnancy-health/complications/measles.aspx
and https://www.babymed.com/measles-rubeola-infection-during-pregnancy
for starters.
There is enough hype & emotion around the subject of vaccines without conflating issues that shouldn’t be conflated.
When outbreaks reach significance, they also become deadly, because its reach will spread from the willfully unvaccinated to those who cannot be vaccinated due to age (infants) or illness (immunocompromised) and those are the two sub-groups most likely to die from measles complications.
Suppressing outbreaks is how you suppress the mortality rate.
Also pediatric ICU is some of the most expensive medical care on the planet. Shots are cheaper.
I see that you have drunk the Koolaid.
Infants used to gain immunity to measles from the anti-bodies which their mothers transferred to them, while they are in the womb and while they are nursing, which the mother developed from being exposed to wild measles. The vaccine apparently does not produce high enough levels, of strong enough anti-bodies to do this. Also, while infants can contract measles, before they are old enough to be safely vaccinated, the disease is almost never fatal, due to the level of medical care available to day.
Now, a disease which is still deadly, pertussis [aka whooping cough] accounted for 15,800 cases in the US with 13 deaths in 2017. And, this was not an unusual year for the disease. Where are the cries to quarantine people who can not prove that they were vaccinated against pertussis? Where are the local governments threatening to fine people who are not vaccinated? Where is the claim that “vaxers” are responsible. And, there a slew of other diseases just as bad.
So, why are measles SSSSOOOO bad? Why is a disease, which accounts for less than 1/15 of the number of reported cases of a disease which actually kills people, so bad that we have to violate people’s rights to protect the population, while we ignore the more serious disease? I’ll give you a hint. Because the measles reaction is a SCAM.
Check out the CDC website on the complications from measles.
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/complications.html
First of all babies can be vaccinated for pertussis at 2 months, but not for measles until 12 months. 2nd of all, not all mothers can breastfeed and often wean earlier than 12 months. And third, your understanding of the conferred immunity is lacking and you overstate its protective abilities.
https://thescientificparent.org/passive-immunity-101-will-breast-milk-protect-my-baby-from-getting-sick/
Last, if the outbreaks get big enough, the very young and the very weak may not survive and if they do, it will be at great cost and possibly with permanent disability. Are you aware that measles resets immune memory to zero and it takes it two years to recover. This is why it is a killer of young children, by making them vulnerable to many secondary infections, encephalitis and pneumonia being the two most frequent.
And here’s your answer as to why the CDC doesn’t make the same fuss over pertussis outbreaks.
Public health experts cannot rely on herd immunity to protect people from pertussis since:
Pertussis spreads so easily
Vaccine protection decreases over time
Acellular pertussis vaccines may not prevent colonization (carrying the bacteria in your body without getting sick) or spread of the bacteria
https://www.cdc.gov/pertussis/about/faqs.html#increasing
Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU. You have just proven that herd immunity is a crock of s**t.
But, you did not answer the question of why the CDC would be pushing the draconian measure that they are, for the relatively harmless measles virus, while ignoring the more deadly pertussis bacteria? After all, even after 5, yes 5, doses of pertussis vaccine, there is less than a 50% efficacy rate. So, the chances of a vaccinated person contracting pertussis is significantly higher than it is for a person vaccinated against measles, to contract measles. And, the infection rate is, at least 15 times as high as measles and there is a real death rate for pertussis. But, no quarantine for people not vaccinated against pertussis. No fines for those not vaccinated against pertussis. No travel ban for those not vaccinated against pertussis or ex[posed to the disease. If this about “protecting” the public from contracting a disease why is the BIG push against a disease which is relatively benign and not against a disease which is a proven killed, every single year.
Wake up. This has nothing to do with ;protecting the p;ublic. The CDC cares nothing about public health. It is all about power and money. There is a reason why the US government passed a law which makes it impossible to sue a vaccine manufacturer in the US. It established a special agency to investigate claims against vaccine manufacturers and has still paid out $1.7 billion in public money between 2006 and 2017 for claims against vaccine manufacturers. And, the stated reason for the passage of the National Vaccine Injury Act was to protect the theory of herd immunity.
People are terrified of the thought of illness. And that is being used in an attempt to save the herd immunity theory.
Dude, perhaps you are misunderstanding the specifics of herd immunity. What works with one disease/vaccine pair does not always apply to another. Measles and it’s vaccine are amenable to herd immunity. Pertussis is not.
That is not true. You can sue the manufacturer if it was negligent and made a defective product. You cannot sue for injuries actually or allegedly caused by properly made vaccines. And the reason is much the same as the reason you cannot sue gun manufacturers for injuries caused by properly made guns. In both cases, if such suits were allowed the manufacturers would just stop making the product. Both vaccines and guns are vital to society, but they are not high-profit items, and the cost of defending litigation would make it uneconomic to stay in the business.
The vaccine compensation fund exists because many vaccines have known side effects, and some people genuinely do get hurt by properly made vaccines, and therefore deserve compensation. The manufacturers pay in to it, and it pays out to verified cases. But the majority of alleged cases of vaccine-caused injury are fake. E.g. the MMR vaccine does not cause autism and anyone who claims their child’s autism was caused by it is a damned liar and doesn’t deserve a penny.
(By the way, cases in VAERS are not verified, they’re just reports of injuries that happened (or are alleged to have happened) shortly after vaccination. Correlation is not causation. Post hoc does not mean propter hoc. Just because a kid happened to get a shot a week before he died doesn’t mean the shot had anything to do with it. But it will show up in VAERS.)
The death rate from measles is approximately one in 3000. The reason there were zero deaths in the USA for so long is because there were effectively zero cases.
Measles was eliminated in the USA for decades. A senior professor of medicine I know told of the time about 10-15 years ago when she was called in on a case of a child with a strange rash that nobody could diagnose. She walked into the room, took one look at the kid, and said “measles”. None of the younger doctors had ever seen a case, and didn’t know what it looked like. Then the anti-vaxx craziness started taking a hold, thanks to the deliberate fraud Andrew Wakefield, who should rot in Hell, and the disease (which was eliminated, not eradicated) came back.
This is totally untrue. There are several hundred cases of measles REPORTED every year. And, there are essentially no deaths from the disease, largely because of the availability and quality of modern medical care. It is not because measles have been totally eliminated. Since 2000, there have been three deaths related to a contacted case of measles; 2 in 2003 and 1 in 2015.
The problem is that in 2000, the CDC stated, categorically, that measles had been eliminated in the US. This was, of course, totally untrue. Several hundred cases are reported every single year. And, now that we are seeing a 2-3 fold increase in the number of reported cases, suddenly we have an apocalyptic situation. People can not go out in public unless they have been vaccinated. They can be fined for not being able to prove they have been inoculated. Now people are going to be banned from traveling by air, if they may have been exposed to measles.
This is a SCAM. Nothing more.
Measles was considered eradicated because no new cases occurred from endemic pools of infection. All new cases/outbreaks were in fact imported by travellers being infected overseas and bringing it back to the US.
No, measles was never considered eradicated from the USA. It was eliminated, which is not the same thing.
No, Mac, what I wrote is the exact truth, and you are writing nonsense. The fatality rate is something like one in 3000. Therefore if there are only several hundred cases a year you should expect a death rate of “essentially none”, i.e. one every 5-10 years. Once we get above 1500 cases a year we will start to see more deaths.
No, Mac, it was totally true. There were not several hundred cases a year in the 1990s. There were zero cases a year, because it had in fact been eliminated. There are several hundred cases a year now for one reason and one reason only: because profiteering liars convinced paranoid freaks to stop vaccinating their children. Andrew Wakefield single-handedly and deliberately invented the lie that MMR causes autism, purely so that he could profit by being paid to testify when parents sued the manufacturers. And that is why children are now getting measles, some have died, and more will die.
Illegals
Well, if you assume that the vast majority of illegal aliens do not get vaccinated then you have a potential infectable population of from 15-35 MILLION people, in the US. This, then, becomes statistically significant.
We should not have to get shots to protect them.
It isn’t air travel that needs to be banned.
This part is true
This part is not true. The vaccination rate in haredi communities in the USA is about 96%, which is higher than the national average. Of course the anti-vaxx craziness exists everywhere, even in these communities, so it’s unfortunately not the 99% or so that one would wish it to be. But the idea that these are obscurantist communities that provide some kind of fertile bed for this craziness is just false.
Get the hell out your horse Milhouse the animal is dead. Disease came back as illegals came in. Just because you worship at the civ Nat altar of paper Americans does not make them blameless no matter what your useless model may say. The feds have been stealth importing little nuggets of Chiapas and Guatemala all through the rural us. Our town of 1500 gained 3500 Guatemalans and Mexicans in a decade. We had a murder rate that rivaled Chicago for a few years until their turf wars shook out. The paper Americans are not your friends.
The disease came back as smartphones came in too. But the smartphones did not cause the disease, and neither did the illegal immigrants. The outbreaks are not happening where they are. The disease came back because Americans decided not to vaccinate their children. Mostly new-age (rhymes with sewage) crunchy granola lefties, but some pig-ignorant John Birch types as well. And eventually this insanity reached even such insular pockets as the chassidic communities of Brooklyn and Rockland County; in very low numbers, but it’s astonishing that it exists there at all.