No fewer than seven CDC officials tell KFF Health News that convicted felon President Trump and Bobby “Brainworms” Kennedy Jr’s regime at the Department of Health and Human Services prevented them from communicating with local officials in Texas during this year’s measles outbreak among the innocent children of anti-vax dipshits. “All of us at CDC train for this moment, a massive outbreak,” one CDC researcher said. “All this training and then we weren’t allowed to do anything.”
It’s not like the local Mennonite communities – the sect has a common ancestry with the Amish but the cultural distancing in the West Texas region is probably more akin to that of Hasidic Jews – hit hardest were open to working with officials. They absolutely were not. The MAGAfied CDC made this worse in its first acknowledgment of the outbreak – which came only after a 6 year-old girl died of the virus – that promoted Vitamin A supplements along with the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine.
Which meant doctors were stuck treating children with measles and Vitamin A poisoning. “How many people will choose Vitamin A and not a vaccine because it appears to them there are two options?” wrote Texas Department of Health official Scott Milton in an email obtained by KFF.
The reporting goes on to contrast the Texas shitshow with what happened in the Hasidic communities of New York City and the Hudson Valley in 2018-2019, where the same conditions had created fertile ground for a measles outbreak. The city responded by roping in dozens of rabbis to get them on board with a vaccine program. “The effort cost more than $7 million, but Jane Zucker, New York City’s assistant health commissioner at the time, said it yielded immense savings. The average medical bill for measles hospitalizations is roughly $18,500,” KFF writes. “I don’t think there’s a price tag to put on a child’s death that would otherwise be prevented,” Zucker said.