Most counties don’t have their own health agencies, and some specific population groups have low vaccination rates
Pennsylvania is bracing for a wave of measles cases, with some public health officials concerned that it’s “only a matter of time” until the disease spreads beyond the outbreak’s epicenter.
Last week the state reported its fifth measles-associated death amid 943 confirmed cases across 39 counties. The outbreak comes amid concerns that public health in the US has been hit by increasing vaccine skepticism, especially due to the power and influence of controversial health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.
Contributing to the challenge is that Pennsylvania is one of the few US states where its counties mostly lack their own health department, with only seven of its 67 counties having their own.
My father nearly died of polio as a kid. This was before the vax. My mother was slightly younger and remembered getting the vax because it was a big deal. It’s super cool how lunatics are undoing all the progress we made protecting children from diseases. Let’s have more suffering, isn’t that great? Ffs.