From CDC:
From January 1 to September 5, 2019, 1,241individual cases of measles have been confirmed in 31 states. This is an increase of 7 cases from the previous week. However, only two of these cases were recently ill. The rest were identified as past cases.
This is the greatest number of cases reported in the U.S. since 1992. More than 75% of the cases this year are linked to outbreaks in New York. Measles is more likely to spread and cause outbreaks in U.S. communities where groups of people are unvaccinated.
The majority of cases are among people who were not vaccinated against measles.Nick Paumgarten at The New Yorker:
Measles can cause serious complications. As of September 5, 2019, 130 of the people who got measles this year were hospitalized, and 65 reported having complications, including pneumonia and encephalitis.
One need not relitigate the case for vaccines here. There have been more than a dozen large-scale, peer-reviewed studies—the most recent one in Denmark, involving more than six hundred and fifty thousand children—that have found no connection between the M.M.R. vaccine and autism. Are there side effects to vaccines? Sometimes. Are there bad doses or batches? If there weren’t, there would be no such thing as the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Does Big Pharma benefit from the vaccine protocol? You bet. At the end of July, Merck, the only U.S. manufacturer of the M.M.R. vaccine, announced that it had earned six hundred and seventy-five million dollars in the previous quarter from the M.M.R. vaccine and the chicken-pox vaccine, a fifty-eight-per-cent increase from the same period last year.
But vaccines work, both for individuals and for the general public. They are one of the great advances of modern times. And they do not cause autism. The science on this point is settled, to the extent that any science ever is, in the pursuit of proving a negative.
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But, if we have to pick a Patient Zero, Andrew Wakefield will do. Wakefield is the British gastroenterologist who produced the notorious article, published in The Lancet in 1998, linking the M.M.R. vaccine to autism. The study, which featured just twelve subjects, was debunked, the article was pulled, and Wakefield lost his license to practice medicine—as well as his reputation, in scientific circles anyway. But, owing to his persistence in the years since, his discredited allegations have spread like mold. In the anti-vaxxer pantheon, he is martyr and saint. There are also the movement’s celebrities, such as Jenny McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., stubborn in the face of ridicule, and the lesser-known but perhaps no less pernicious YouTube evangelists, such as Toni Bark, a purveyor of homeopathic products, and the Long Island pediatrician Lawrence Palevsky. If your general practitioner is Dr. Google, you can find a universe of phony expertise. The movement seems to sniff out susceptibility. Not surprisingly, there is money there, though the financial incentives behind this strand of advocacy are less clear than, say, what has led the Koch brothers to champion fossil fuels. This spring, the Washington Post reported that the New York hedge-fund manager Bernard Selz and his wife, Lisa, have given more than three million dollars to anti-vaccination causes and helped finance “Vaxxed,” Wakefield’s 2016 documentary, which purports to reveal a C.D.C. conspiracy to cover up the connection between vaccines and autism. Needless to say, the anti-vaccination ethos is by no means exclusive to the New York tristate-area Orthodox community. It thrives in certain pockets—affluent boho-yoga moms, evangelical Christians, Area 51 insurgents. The vaccination rates are about the same in Monsey and in Malibu. Before New Square, the three most recent big outbreaks of measles occurred among Somali immigrants, in Minnesota; Amish farmers, in Ohio; and a hodgepodge of visitors to Disneyland.
