Richard H. Hughes, IV, Member of the Firm in the Health Care & Life Sciences practice, and Anna Larson, Advisor, co-authored an article in MedPage Today, titled “Measles Cases Top 1,000: A Crisis of Complacency.”
Following is an excerpt:
In late February, the Secretary of Health and Human Services sat in the White House cabinet room and downplayed a measles outbreak in Texas -- referring to the then-146 cases and the first death in a decade as "not unusual." Since then, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has touted unproven treatments for measles and emphasized vaccination as a personal choice rather than a public good.
And, while he finally recommended measles vaccination to address the snowballing case count, he then ordered the search for new measles treatments instead of promoting vaccination. Concurrently, the administration has made significant cuts to vaccine research, canceling research related to vaccine hesitancy and misinformation, announced a requirement that all new vaccine products undergo placebo-controlled clinical trials prior to licensure, and initiated research at CDC to fund the already-studied and non-existent link between vaccines and autism.
The story of measles in the U.S. has continued to unfold: additional deaths in Texas and New Mexico; exposure at a major U.S. airport following an identified case in Maryland; and confirmed cases exceeding 1,000 and expanding to over half of U.S. states. Meanwhile, a recent poll shows that one-third of parents surveyed have been exposed to the claim that the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine is more dangerous than contracting measles -- a 15% increase from a similar poll this time last year.
