US in Danger of Losing ‘Measles-Free’ Status From World Health Organization
Meanwhile, California health official quits after calling anti-vaccination proponents “flat-earthers.”
Two new cases of measles reported in the country last week turned out not to be measles. This shows that health authorities may yet get control of the worst outbreak of the highly contagious disease in the US since 1992. However, if more cases pop up, America may lose its “measles-free” status.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also determined that two previously reported cases of the disease were not in fact measles, keeping the total number of cases for the year at 1,241 as of Sept. 12.
The outbreak, which began in New York on Oct. 1, has largely been linked to parents who declined to vaccinate their children.
The number of extended outbreaks of the measles due to the lack of vaccinations means that the US is in danger of losing its World Health Organization (WHO) “measles elimination” designation.
“As a global leader in public health, it is mortifying that (the U.S.) may lose its measles elimination status,” said Dr. Paul Spiegel, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health. “The measles outbreaks should not have occurred as vaccination against measles is very effective.”
The U.S. isn’t alone. Four countries — Albania, Greece, the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom — recently lost their measles elimination status, which the World Health Organization defines as the absence of continuous disease transmission for greater than 12 months.
The U.S. would immediately lose its elimination status if there is any case connected to the current outbreak on or after Oct. 2, according to CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund. If there’s a case that was not transmitted through the current outbreak, however, then the U.S. would not lose elimination status.
Infectious disease specialists around the country are troubled by this backward direction of the nation’s public health status.
It also sends the wrong message to the rest of the world, said Dr. Walter Orenstein, associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center at Emory University. “We’ll find out in early October whether we did lose it but if we did then we have to go another whole year without measles or ongoing transmission. And to the world, it may say, ‘See this may be too difficult to do.’
“And I think it’s important because I believe eventually measles should be eradicated.”
Meanwhile, in California, the state’s health chief resigns after calling anti-vaccine people ‘flat-earthers.’
Jennifer Kent, director of the California Department of Health Care Services, will step down at the end of September after making negative comments about people who oppose vaccination, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
The agency did not provide details on the reason for Ms. Kent’s resignation, which was announced Sept. 10. However, the report notes she recently posted on Facebook and called anti-vaccine protestors at the state capitol “flat-earthers.” The post included the hashtags “#believeinscience” and “#vaccinateyourgoddamnkids,” according to the report.
Legal Insurrection readers may recall that one of the anti-vaccine demonstrators recently tossed a menstrual cup filled with blood into the state senate chambers. The woman has been released on bond.
The woman was among several protesters watching the waning hours of the legislative session for year from the upstairs balcony in the Senate at 5:14 p.m., when she hurled what the California Highway Patrol called “a feminine hygiene device containing what appeared to be blood” at several lawmakers. “That’s for the dead babies,” she yelled.
Rebecca Lee Dalelio, 43, was arrested on suspicion of felony vandalism, misdemeanor battery and four other counts related to disrupting official state business. She posted $10,000 bond and was released from the Sacramento County Main Jail on Saturday morning, according to sheriff’s department records.
It won’t be too much longer before everyone in this state, not just Scott Presler’s clean-up volunteers, will need a hazmat suit.
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Catastrophic anthropogenic immigration reform?
Flat-earther, consensus, indeed. Vaccinations are not magical elixirs with perfect performance and without side-effects. Vaccines are part of a risk management protocol.
First a scientist on Vaccines. NOT an “anti-Vaxxer” but concerned that nothing has been double blind tested. He and Scott Adams reviews the state of medicine:
https://www.scottadamssays.com/2019/09/16/episode-664-scott-adams-join-me-with-dr-shiva-now-to-talk-about-vaccinations/
Sounds more like Witch Doctor’s witch’s brew as a sacrament, not science.
Maybe lets get rid of the vaccine kangaroo court and leave it to juries if all the junk – polysorbate 80, aluminum, mercury (if you break your CFL…), squalene, dead baby cells, who knows what along with an antigen or too – is safe.
Because we cured smallpox with a bifurcated needle and scratches using a relatively safe virus doesn’t mean any toxic chemical cocktail will be safe and effective just because Perdue or Merck say it is and the FDA isn’t testing it. Hey, maybe we can put vaccines in the vaping and vaping would be declared safe!
We can’t be measles free as long as measly migrants matriculate here. How about quarantining them like they try to do with fruits – they have inspection stations to prevent MedFlys.
HIV was placed into a political wrapper and became untouchable by standard public health policy for communicable (and deadly) diseases. This upswing is part political, part immigration and part laissez faire by many in risks associated with these once contained diseases. Just waiting for polio to make a big comeback.
“I’m not an antixvaxer”.
Perhaps we should leave the cray-cray to the Left. They’ve certainly developed an affection for it.
No medicine that works uses magic. Any medicine that works by other than magic has less than 100% success and includes some amount of risk. Life ain’t a safe space.
Stuff that uses placebo effect – crystals, copper bracelets, homeopathy, howling at the sky all involve belief in some form of magic. Funny thing, none of the magic stuff actually treats or cure any real disease.
That’s not entirely accurate.
While it’s true that the magic crystal didn’t treat the disease, belief in whatever has some healing properties in some people.
Good breakdown here in a respected journal that publishes peer-reviewed biomedical science:
https://n.neurology.org/content/71/9/e25
California can’t stay Typhus free, and the raw sewage and needles on the sidewalks are a far bigger public health hazard than measles, but there isn’t billions to be made for big pharma cleaning up the medical waste.
Measles is very infectious, but Typhus is basic sanitation. Typhus is far worse than Measles.
Just wait until Yersina Pestis shows up and finds asylum in the rats of LA.
Yersinia pestis is already endemic in the American West. We just need a greater population of rats, mice, and other flea-carriers living in close quarters with humans.
Iirc, there was a small, not even double digit, outbreak in SoCA in the mid ’70s linked to raccoons living in a family’s chimney.
And then there’s Hanta virus….
And how did this happen?? Even if you have not vaccinated the disease doesn’t come ion the mail. Meaning it had to be brought in somehow and how would it get in UNVETTED? AFM spikes every 2 election cycle years as well now what would the tie in be??
Measles moves via airborne transmission, if you have just one carrier in a public place hundreds can be exposed. Among those hundreds, some are likely to have compromised immunity, some are 40+ years from their childhood immunizations, etc. Measles -was- well controlled in the US by herd immunity, but when that gets trashed the disease comes back.
Herd immunity does not protect individuals. Immunity does not preclude carriers. The progress may have been forced by CAIR. It may have been evolved in vivo (e.g. immunized individuals).
Measles was eliminated from the USA in 2000. Most new cases come in when unvaccinated Americans travel to other countries and bring it back with them. Most of the rest come in when unvaccinated foreigners travel legally to the USA, not knowing that they’ve recently been infected. Illegal immigrants do not appear to be a significant factor in the spread of measles in the USA.
For instance, the outbreak in Detroit earlier this year came from one person, an Israeli visitor who was here 100% legally, and who started feeling ill a few days into his visit. By the time he was diagnosed (on his second doctor visit) he had spread it to dozens of people who’d been insufficiently vaccinated. (In the ’60s and ’70s only one dose was given rather than the two that are now the standard practice, and a significant number of people who grew up then are not immune.)
The outbreak in Israel, in turn, seems to have come from the Ukraine, traveling with Israeli visitors. At least 100,000 Israelis a year visit the Ukraine, and some of them are unvaccinated.
“Most new cases come in when unvaccinated Americans travel to other countries and bring it back with them.”
This is also slightly untrue or poorly worded because it suggests that these might be anti-vaxxers or never-vaxxers for some other reason. A substantial portion thinks they are vaxxers and have lost immunity for a variety of reasons. That’s the biggest problem here.
There’s very little if any evidence that immunity to measles can be lost. The people who are getting it are unvaccinated, for various reasons, or insufficiently vaccinated, because when they were growing up only one dose was given, or the 3% for whom the vaccine is ineffective.
Lost immunity is the reason for booster shots. If vaccines worked as advertised, one shot would do the trick.
It seems to be common that people are poor at weighing risks and selecting the lesser evil. The same problem exists in politics.
If we did not allow millions of un-vaccinated to cross our border unchecked and they cleaned up the poop, there would be no problem.
If you want to avoid measles, go get vaccinated. I don’t see the problem as being caused by anti-vaxxers.
Measles is not coming in over the southern border.
And no, being vaccinated is not a 100% protection. First of all it’s only 97% effective, so if exposed you still have a 3% chance of getting infected. Second, some people can’t be vaccinated, either because they’re allergic, or have weak immune systems, or are too young.
Oh that is right! Measles does not exist south of the US border so the millions of un-vaccinated have zero impact.
The fact is that that is not where measles is coming from.
Celebrate Diversity with measles!
And typhus! And typhoid fever!! And leprosy!!! And bubonic plague!!!!
Great Maker. What the hell did we do wrong. It’s the 21st century. We should be well beyond this kind of stuff. But we aren’t. And it’s getting worse. 🙁
Nature has a way of thinning the herd by eliminating the stupid.
BS, it’s linked to illegals, period
No, it isn’t. Sorry, that’s a fact. The outbreaks are not happening among people who’ve come from Mexico, or people exposed to them.
You are correct that there isn’t a proven link, but you are wrong in definitely saying it’s not caused by immigration.
It’s difficult to trace all sources, especially when you have asymptomatic carriers.
People are reacting to 1200+ measles cases in a 12 month period the same way that they react to mass shootings. They want to blame something other than the actual causes.
What should be taken from the spike in measles cases, is why are they occurring and who is being affected by them. What the medical profession has not addressed, at all, is the number of adults and young people, who have had the complete battery of measles vaccinations and who have contracted the disease. If this number falls within the lack of efficacy percentage, then there is nothing to see here. This can simply be chalked up to the natural percentage of persons who do not gain immunity from the vaccine. Also, the percentage of cases which were not vaccinated can be clearly laid at the feet of the lack of vaccination of the person infected. If such is the case, then it follows that the medical community would not be concerned about this. However, for some reason, the medical community is strangely agitated. As for the number of pre-vaccinated newborns who are contracting the disease, no research seems to be being undertaken. In these cases, one would expect that the mother’s immunity would have been passed on to the child, at least for the first few months to a year, and would be boosted through breastfeeding. Now, previous studies have shown there is a tendency for the level of anti-body production, as well as the strength of the anti-bodies, to be less from vaccination than from exposure to wild measles and for the efficacy of these anti-bodies to be significantly reduced the farther one gets from the date of vaccination. There has also been no real reporting on whether the strain of measles responsible for the spike has suffered any genetic drift from the strain which the vaccine is designed to fight.
So, instead of blaming the vaccines in use, as well as the strain of the disease, the PR campaign has been to place the entire blame upon a very small portion of the population who chooses not to be vaccinated. Of course, this totally ignores that fact that the act of being vaccinated is supposed to provide the person vaccinated with immunity from the disease. This is the same rational used to blame the choice of weapon used by a mass shooter rather than the fact that none of his victims are armed or allowed to be armed.
Yes. Well said. Maybe the medical establishment has been overplaying their hand for quite some time. Maybe natural immunity developed through childhood diseases is a better result than trying to avoid diseases altogether through vaccination for non-fatal diseases. For instance, am I the only one who got chickenpox along with all the other kids in the neighborhood?? “Conservatives” need to stop freaking out and demanding that people get injected with foreign substances under penalty of law. That’s not conservative; it’s authoritarian.
Chickenpox can be fatal. Rarely, but it happens. When we were kids that was a risk our parents had to accept because there was no alternative. Now that a vaccine is available, all responsible parents have their children vaccinated for it.
Of course. Lots of diseases that aren’t really a problem most of the time *can be* fatal. The flu can be terribly fatal, as we saw in 1918. So, get yourself a vaccine if you want one, but don’t insist that everybody else get one.
BTW, the vaccines for these diseases have a fatality rate as well. If I remember correctly, while no measles deaths have been reported in the USA for the last couple decades, there have been something like 100 measles deaths reported (which undercounts) from the vaccine itself.
Again, I’m vaccinated against measles, so I’ve made the risk/reward choice in that direction, but don’t fault others who might make a different choice.
Dear God, MAC, hit the paragraph button on so I can take an occasional breath.
I’m sorry. For those readers who have to sound out the words as they read, I will try to break up long paragraphs into shorter ones. – Mac45
Just being sarcastic.
This strikes me as a big “meh!” Measles is not smallpox. It’s not often fatal or even very serious and there has never been a big need to eradicate measles. As a conservative, if liberty means *anything*, it means being able to decide what foreign substances you stick into your own body. So, while I myself and all my children have been vaccinated for measles, I don’t have any heartburn with antivaxers choosing to not vaccinate, and I have some friends that are *very* antivax. And it boggles me that anybody else cares either way. The whole theory of vaccination is that the person being vaccinated develops their own immunity. So, if I’m vaccinated for smallpox and you aren’t and smallpox comes calling, I survive and you don’t. Worst case, people reap the results of their own actions. This whole idea that we have freak out and force people to stick foreign matter into their bodies as a matter of law is just crap. If you want to be vaccinated, great, do it. But if other people don’t want to be vaccinated, leave them alone.
What the medical community is trying to protect is the Herd Immunity Theory. this theory postulates that if a significant portion of a population [92-95%] then the disease against will the immunity exists will disappear from that population. The medical community claimed that measles had been eliminated in the US, because this threshold had been reached in 2000. However, though the percentage of those immune, either through natural exposure or vaccination is still 95+%, in the US, we had a measles spike. And, this should not happen, if the Herd Immunity Theory is valid. Of course, it becomes even worse if this shows that the efficacy of the current vaccine and vaccination program does not produce the long-term immunity claimed. That would involve BIG money to the vaccine industry.
Mac, you are spot on about this in last 2 posts. Your posts tend to be verbose while mine are concise (to each his own), but I concede that you have said it better than I can this time around.
I would, with a bit of a humorous smirk, ask that you consider more paragraph breaks for a comment section, though.
I don’t want to belong to anybody’s herd.
Dear God, MAC, hit the paragraph button on so I can take an occasional breath.
2 Dear God, MAC, hit the paragraph button on so I can take an occasional breath.