State and local public-health officials working on the ground to combat the measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico say that so far, their dealings with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been business as usual. What’s unusual is that the agency, now under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s purview, hasn’t been blasting out its guidance nationally.
The outbreak in Texas has sickened at least 124 people since late January, most of them children and almost none of them vaccinated against measles. One child has died from the disease in Texas. Nine people in New Mexico have also been infected.
The outbreak’s rapid growth is “the kind of thing that would get [the CDC] to do a Health Alert, or to support the state and local in a more national briefing,” Anne Schuchat, a former principal deputy director of the CDC, told NOTUS.