Shedding and the Texas Measles Outbreak

we have been here before...

Feb 26, 2025

In each and every large measles outbreak, there are a few things you can expect, especially that anti-vaccine influencers are going to blame shedding!

Even though the great majority of measles cases in these outbreaks are in unvaccinated children and adults and are wild type virus, they want you to believe that the real culprit are those folks who got vaccinated!

Shedding is all anti-vax folks talk about during measles outbreaks!!! And of course, they have no science to back up their claims.

Or if it’s not shedding, anti-vax folks want to talk about leaky vaccines and vaccine failure.

Nature had its chance in the pre-vaccine era. Just before the first measles vaccine was developed, measles killed over 400 people each and every year in the United States.

But of course, none of that jives with the data we see from these outbreaks.

The Texas Dept. Of State Health Services reports that the cases in the South Plains outbreak have been found to be from the D8 genotype, a wild type strain. Remember, the vaccine strain is genotype A… Interesting how anti-vaccine influencers don’t mention this!

For example, in the South Plains and Panhandle regions of Texas measles outbreak, so far, since beginning on January 29, we have had at least 124 confirmed cases of measles including:

18 people who were sick enough to require hospitalization
only five cases in people who had at least one MMR vaccine, with the rest being unvaccinated or unknown vaccination status
that most cases are in the Mennonite community, which traditionally have very low immunization rates, especially the group in this area
a D8 strain for all the cases that have been genotyped (per Texas Dept. of State Health Services media inquiry) - no vaccine strains (the vaccine strain is genotype A) have been found!
as is typical to help control measles outbreaks, the extra public health MMR vaccine clinics didn’t begin until after the Texas outbreak was well underway! One of the first MMR vaccine clinics in Gaines County occured on February 6 and 7. There was no ‘mass measles vaccination campaign’ before the outbreak, although considering how low their immunization rates are, maybe there should have been. Remember, this region has one of the lowest childhood vaccination rates in Texas.

Now, while you might think that 124 cases isn’t a lot, this is the largest outbreak in Texas in 32 years!

It surpasses the Kingwood outbreak (near Houston) of 1996, when we had about 49 confirmed and probable cases of measles. An outbreak that took seven months to contain.

And before that?

In 1992 there were 1,097 cases of measles in Texas.

While that certainly seems like a lot, it actually dwarfs that numbers seen as we were coming out of some large epidemics of measles across the US in the late 1980s, including:

1989 - 3,201 cases, 500 hospitalizations, and 10 deaths in Texas
1990 - 4,409 cases, 1,065 hospitalizations, and 12 deaths in Texas

Do you see the point of getting vaccinated and protected now?

The only pattern to see is how anti-vaccine influencers launder the same misinformation across their social media accounts and websites to scare you away from getting vaccinated and protected. They misuse statistics to make you believe that measles is mild so you don’t think about how deadly it can really be.

With more and more cases, we will eventually run out of luck and some people will die.

(Breaking News - the first death has now been reported in an unvaccinated child that was hospitalized in this measles outbreak.)

Yes, they will die with measles, because it is a serious, life-threatening disease.

It was never mild and never will be, unless we come up with a new treatment or cure. What about vitamin A? Sure, that helps, but mainly if you are severely deficient in vitamin A, which we don’t typically see in developed countries.

We’ve been here before…

After the large epidemics in the late 1980s we did something. We added a second dose of MMR to help make sure everyone was protected.

What will we do now as we start to see record numbers of measles cases again?

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References

Lubbock Public Health to Host Drive-Up Measles (MMR) Vaccine Clinic for Unvaccinated Citizens. https://web.archive.org/web/20250215015859/https://ci.lubbock.tx.us/news/1739365594-lubbock-public-health-to-host-drive-up-measles-mmr-vaccine-clinic-for-unvaccinated-citizens

The Religious Community at the Center of Texas' Measles Outbreak. https://www.newsweek.com/texas-measles-outbreak-mennonites-2034627

G.V.

Feb 27Edited

- It's deadly;

- It can cause deafness, brain damage, heart damage, nervous system damage, and other lifelong-disabling conditions/issues;

- It causes immune amnesia (you can lose ALL the immunity you've built up to that point, to everything https://asm.org/articles/2019/may/measles-and-immune-amnesia -- not a good idea when we have a looming potential H5N1 pandemic and an ongoing Covid pandemic, both viruses that ALSO have long-term effects on the immune system);

- It has an R0 of 12-18 (an infected person will infect 12-18 other people, who will each go on to infect 12-18 other people, who will each...);

- It can be carried and spread asymptomatically, and asymptomatic infections can still cause long-term damage/problems.

EVEN IF the vaccine carried a measurable risk, which it does not, a 7-year-old of average intelligence doing a basic cost-benefit analysis could easily figure out that the vaccine would have to be pretty dangerous to be worth skipping and risking a measles infection.

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