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AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Texas, where an unvaccinated child has died of measles. It’s the first reported measles death in the United States in a decade. The child’s death in a hospital in Lubbock, West Texas, comes as the largest measles outbreak in the state in over 30 years is now spreading to New Mexico. Since it began late last month, 124 people have contracted the disease, most of them unvaccinated children. On Thursday, the newly appointed head of Health and Human Services, vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., called the death “not unusual.” During the White House Cabinet meeting, he told reporters, “We have measles outbreaks every year.”
HHS SECRETARY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: We are following the measles epidemic every day. I think there’s 124 people who have contracted measles at this point, mainly in Gaines County, Texas, mainly, we’re told, in the Mennonite community. There are two people who have died. But the — we’re watching it. And there are about 20 people hospitalized, mainly for quarantine. We’re watching it. We put out a post on it yesterday, and we’re going to continue to follow it. Incidentally, there have been four measles outbreaks this year in this country. Last year, there were 16. So, it’s not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year.
AMY GOODMAN: Correcting RFK Jr.’s claims of two deaths, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services later clarified only one person had died of the measles outbreak. Although Kennedy said that people were being hospitalized mainly for quarantine, local health officials say that’s not the case. Dr. Lara Johnson, a chief medical officer at the Lubbock hospital, said patients have been hospitalized for respiratory issues.
DR. LARA JOHNSON: We were confident that we’d eradicated measles from the United States and had really gotten to a point where we just didn’t see these kinds of outbreaks happening. Obviously, that has changed over the last 20-something years. And so, we do see outbreaks more frequently, but that is related to how much we’re vaccinating our population.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined from Houston, Texas, by Peter Hotez, internationally recognized physician, pediatrician, scientist on neglected tropical diseases and vaccine development. He’s co-director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, the author of several books, including The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning and Preventing the Next Pandemic: Vaccine Diplomacy in a Time of Anti-Science. He also wrote the book Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad.
Dr. Hotez, welcome to Democracy Now! If you can start off responding to what is happening in West Texas? How unusual is this child’s death?
DR. PETER HOTEZ: Well, it’s devastating — right, Amy? — because this is a school-age child who was denied access to the MMR vaccine, was unvaccinated. This is a death that never had to happen. And the problem is there could be additional deaths — I hope not — but, you know, those kids in the hospital are there for a reason: because they’re sick.
You know, if you look at what happens when an unvaccinated child gets measles, on average, 20% require hospitalizations, usually because of respiratory illness, as was mentioned in this instance, because of measles pneumonia. It’s a giant cell pneumonia that’s very devastating, often requires an ICU admission. And that’s just the beginning. Then there’s dehydration from measles diarrhea. There’s neurologic involvement, encephalitis, deafness, hearing loss. And the list goes on.
And so, I think the message that we really need to understand is measles is a serious illness. In the 1980s, 3 million kids died every year from measles. It was the single leading killer of children globally. Now, through the Gavi Alliance, the Global Alliance of Vaccines and Immunization, we’ve brought it down to 100,000 deaths — still a lot of deaths. But our vaccine ecosystem is very fragile, because measles is so highly transmissible. The minute you stop vaccinating and maintaining that vigilance of 90-95% vaccine coverage, the measles comes roaring back. And that’s what’s happened here in West Texas.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, there were so many inaccuracies in what RFK Jr. said, among them that the people who are in the hospital are mainly there for isolation, and yet you have the doctors saying it’s respiratory distress. Can you explain what happens to the body?
DR. PETER HOTEZ: Yeah. What happens is, when you become infected with the measles virus — and if 10 unvaccinated kids are exposed to the virus, nine will acquire the infection. That’s how contagious it is. And then what happens is you get a prodrome of what we used to call the three Cs — cough, coryza, which means upper respiratory involvement and congestion, conjunctivitis — followed by the rash. And the rash is occurring because the virus is getting into the bloodstream and disseminating to the skin and all parts of the body. And unfortunately, that includes what we call hematogenous spread to the lungs, and it causes a very damaging pneumonitis and pneumonia, and then can also result in encephalitis and other involvement.
And so, that’s what’s happening to these kids. These are very sick kids. And unfortunately, you know, the number — the official number is around 124. I think there’s many more kids who are still getting diagnosed or who are escaping medical attention. And the numbers will continue to accelerate. This thing is still on a steep climb, and the numbers will continue to accelerate. And so, unfortunately, will the hospitalizations.
AMY GOODMAN: The chair of the Senate Health Committee that confirmed Kennedy is a doctor from Louisiana, and he was a major promoter of vaccines when he was a doctor. He famously talks about one kid at 18 who was medevacked, will spend the rest of her life dealing with what happened because she wasn’t vaccinated. But then, in Louisiana, they ended promoting mass vaccinations. Can you talk about what’s happening in Texas? And who are the communities, these unvaccinated communities, like the Mennonites, who are not necessarily anti-vaccine, Dr. Hotez?
DR. PETER HOTEZ: That’s absolutely right. There’s no religious prohibitions against vaccinations really in just about any religion, but including the Mennonite community. So, I think what we’re hearing is an anti-vaccine activist kind of got to them, and they’re an insular — a relatively insular group, and therefore, they were able to operate. And that’s what these anti-vaccine groups do. They’re highly predatory. They target groups with disinformation. And unfortunately, our anti-vaccine lobby here is very aggressive. It really started accelerating around 10 years ago, using a lot of health freedom, medical freedom, what I call, propaganda. And the consequence of that is we — and they lobby elected officials.
And the consequence of that is we now have over 100,000 kids whose parents have filed personal belief exemptions in the state of Texas. And this doesn’t even count the many, many homeschooled kids. So, this is like — the metaphor I like to use, it’s like the warm waters of the Caribbean right before a hurricane hits. And the reason why the hurricane accelerates is the warm waters of the Caribbean. And in this case, the warm waters are this huge unvaccinated cohort of kids and adults in West Texas, and other parts of Texas, as well, East Texas. And so, that’s why I think this is going to be relatively easy for the measles virus, unfortunately, to spread among those unvaccinated populations —
AMY GOODMAN: So, what has to happen right now —
DR. PETER HOTEZ: — who are quite vulnerable in many parts of the state.
AMY GOODMAN: — Dr. Hotez? What has to happen in Texas, in New Mexico?
DR. PETER HOTEZ: Well, the single most important thing is to get parents to go to a vaccination center, their pediatrician, and get them vaccinated, because a single dose of the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, the MMR vaccine, is more than 90% protective. And by the way, if you’ve been recently exposed and you get the vaccine within 72 hours, you can actually prevent your child from getting severe measles or maybe prevent the infection altogether. So the key is getting as many kids possible vaccinated in a catch-up campaign. And that’s got to be the number one priority.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Hotez, I want to ask you another question. You were on an Ebola task force years ago. President Trump yesterday at his Cabinet meeting introduced a non-Cabinet member to address the group, and, of course, it was the world’s wealthiest person. It was Elon Musk. This is what he had to say about Ebola.
ELON MUSK: And I should say also, we all make mistakes. We won’t be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we’ll fix it very quickly. So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled, very briefly, was Ebola, Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.
AMY GOODMAN: So. they restored it immediately, and there was no interruption, says Elon Musk. I’m looking at a piece in The Washington Post, “Musk says DOGE ‘restored’ Ebola prevention effort. Officials say that’s not true.” Can you explain what’s going on here, I mean, with the evisceration of USAID? And what happens when CDC sends doctors for surveillance, for testing, and why doing that in countries, for example, in Africa — though it’s important to do just for the people of Africa — why it affects us here at home, as well?
DR. PETER HOTEZ: You know, Amy, one of the most common questions I’m asked literally goes like this: you know, “Hey, Doc, what the heck is going on?” That’s literally the question. When you try to figure out what they’re trying to ask, what they really mean is: Why are we seeing this regular cadence of pandemic and pandemic threats? We had severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS1, in 2002, then H1N1, and then Ebola in 2014 in West Africa that hit Dallas, Texas. I got involved in Governor Rick Perry’s task force at that time. Then we had Zika in 2016, Ebola again, a devastating epidemic in East Congo in 2019, then SARS2-COVID-19. We had Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome.
And the answer is, we think, 21st-century forces, which include climate change and urbanization and deforestation. We could do a whole-hour discussion about why that promotes this steady rise of pandemics. This is one of our nation’s greatest threats, and in my view as important as military threats. And therefore, we’ve got to take biosecurity very seriously. And frankly, we’re not. We’re parading virologists in front of C-SPAN cameras to try to accuse them of COVID origins and this kind of nonsense, when we know that the SARS2-COVID arose just like the original SARS did. We denigrate what the good work of USAID does. And we can’t do that. We are so vulnerable right now to the next wave of pandemics, including possibly another coronavirus, as well as filoviruses like Ebola. And we’ve got this thing, Amy, in case you don’t know it, H5N1 — right? — which is accelerating across the cattle and the wild birds and the poultry in the United States. We’ve got to buckle down and take this seriously, and we’re just not.
AMY GOODMAN: So, I have two quick questions, and we just have a minute. Can you comment on the FDA canceling a meeting of vaccine experts scheduled to advise on flu shots? The significance of this cancellation?
DR. PETER HOTEZ: Yeah, that’s a head scratcher. You know, making the flu vaccine each year is a carefully orchestrated dance, because it involves three different virus strains: two influenza A types, H1N1, H3N2, and an influenza B. To get it right, we have to start meeting in February in order to tell the manufacturers which specific vaccine strains to make in order to have it ready by September. So the manufacturers need to know that now. And that’s done through consultation meetings based at the World Health Organization, which ordinarily CDC would be invited to, but now we’ve pulled out of the WHO. And then we bring it to the U.S. FDA in case there’s any tweaks that need to be made specifically to benefit the U.S. population. So, by canceling that meeting, it just shoots ourselves in the foot. It’s inexplicable.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, I wanted to ask you — we talked about Ebola, but do you know about this mysterious illness in eastern [sic] DRC? World Health Organization, which Trump has pulled us out of, says it’s not Marburg or Ebola, likely came from a bat. Could it be a novel virus? So far, 419 cases, 53 deaths.
DR. PETER HOTEZ: Now, the DR Congo is a very interesting place, because you do have that mix of bats, which carry both coronaviruses and filoviruses, as well as deforestation and populations encroaching on those forested areas. And so, this is why we see so many viruses emerge out of the Democratic Republic of Congo. And so there’s surveillance again. CDC has an active presence there. We have U.S. scientists [inaudible] at universities, like my good friend and colleague Dr. Anne Rimoin has a group there. And this is why we need to maintain our vigilance, because there’s new viruses emerging on a regular basis.
AMY GOODMAN: And again, just to correct myself, that was in west DRC, not in east. Dr. Peter Hotez, thanks so much for being with us, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, co-director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development, author of several books, including The Deadly Rise of Anti-science: A Scientist’s Warning.
Coming up, we’re going to talk more about Elon Musk, but first, Lebanon after Nasrallah. We’ll go to Sharif Abdel Kouddous in southern Lebanon. Stay with us.
