Texas health officials on Tuesday said the county at the center of the state’s measles outbreak is no longer classified as an outbreak county.
The Texas Department of State Health Services reported no new cases of measles tied to the West Texas outbreak in their weekly update.
The state has been tracking case numbers since the outbreak began in late January.
Only Lamar County is listed as an outbreak county in the latest update.
Since late January, 753 measles cases have been confirmed by state officials.
Gaines County, the center of the outbreak, has reported 414 cases since the outbreak began in January. The county accounts for more than half of the state’s cases.
Only Lamar County has been designated as an “outbreak county” by DSHS.
There have been 98 patients hospitalized since the outbreak started. The state says these hospitalizations are from earlier in the outbreak.
Since January, 21 cases have been reported in people who were considered fully vaccinated and 22 cases in people who only had one dose of the vaccine. 710 of the 753 people who tested positive were unvaccinated.
In Texas, two school-aged children have died from complications with the measles. Both were not vaccinated and had no known underlying conditions, state health officials said.
We may finally be at the tail end of this thing. Given how grim some of the earlier projections were, this could have been a lot worse. I’m not ready to hoist the “Mission Accomplished” banner yet – let’s give it at least one more no-new-cases week, please – but we’re getting close.
Well, in Texas we are. Because here’s the bad news.
This year’s measles outbreak is the worst since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000. Halfway through 2025, reported cases have already surpassed 1,274 − the peak for all of 2019.
According to data from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Outbreak Response Innovation, it reported a total of 1,277 confirmed cases, as of July 5. The majority of cases are linked to a large outbreak that originated in west Texas. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said other cases arose from community transmission or during travel.
The outbreak has led to at least 155 hospitalizations, including 431 adults and 824 children. There have been three confirmed deaths.
[…]
Confirmed measles cases have been reported by 39 states and jurisdictions as of July 5. Most of the cases have been reported in Texas, New Mexico and Kansas, according to the Center for Outbreak Response Innovation and the CDC.
TPR has the national count at 1,281 as of July 8, up from 1,267 the week before. That’s slow growth, but it’s still growth. And every new case is a new high.
And as a reminder, we have a lunatic in charge of our public health.
It’s difficult to keep track of all the ways in which Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is undermining public health. When it comes to the Food and Drug Administration, his assault ranges from firing the administrative staff who support drug safety inspectors to deciding that artificial intelligence will fix everything.
One of the Trump administration’s myriad purges of federal workers took out the staff that coordinates travel for inspectors of foreign drug factories. While those eliminations might sound like small potatoes in the face of the terminations of top scientists and officials at the FDA, they make it much more difficult for those inspections to occur.
Most people who have ever had a normal job understand this. You can’t fire support staff without compromising the work of the staff they support. But since Kennedy, President Donald Trump, and former co-President Elon Musk have no idea how real jobs work, they’re probably unfamiliar with the concept. Still, these support staff cuts mean that managers, rather than support staff, are now forced to handle travel, budgets, visas, translators for FDA inspectors, and other tasks.
Guess what happens if FDA inspectors aren’t inspecting foreign drug factories that manufacture products for the United States market? You guessed it: Safety violations will go unnoticed and unaddressed. ProPublica documented that when FDA inspectors visited a Sun Pharma factory in India in 2022, they found metal shavings on equipment, contaminated drug vials, and unknown matter being mixed into drugs. Around the same time, a visit to an Intas Pharmaceuticals factory in India found manipulated testing records covering up the fact that things like glass were making their way into the drugs manufactured there.
So it appears Americans are going to experience the joy of taking drugs tainted by ground glass and god knows what else. Seems bad! But maybe things are better stateside?
Nope. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are planning to use artificial intelligence in the drug approval process. How? Well, Kennedy isn’t so clear on that part. He says AI will be used to “look at the mega data that we have and be able to make really good decisions about interventions”—which is a word salad.
It goes on from there. But here there is also some potentially good news. As with so many things these days, it comes via lawsuit.
A pregnant physician is at the center of a new lawsuit against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and doctors say her concerns about whether she’ll have access to a COVID-19 vaccine reflect a growing confusion about vaccine policy across the country.
The pregnant person — identified in court filings as “Jane Doe” — is one of several plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit filed this week in Massachusetts that features a coalition of medical societies, including those focused on children and pregnant people such as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine (SMFM). Doe herself is a physician.
According to the lawsuit, Doe is more than 20 weeks pregnant and works in a hospital “where she puts herself at risk of infectious diseases every day to care for patients and save lives.”
She was vaccinated against COVID-19 before becoming pregnant, but her doctors advised her to get another dose later in pregnancy for better protection against the disease, according to the lawsuit. While Doe has not yet tried to obtain a COVID-19 vaccine, she intends to while pregnant. She fears she will be unable to because of Kennedy’s recent changes to COVID-19 vaccine policy for pregnant people, according to attorneys for the plaintiffs.
“Her worries are not just for herself, but also for the health and safety of her unborn child,” the lawsuit reads.
The lawsuit focuses on Kennedy’s announcement in May on social media, which plaintiffs describe as a directive, that COVID-19 vaccination would be removed from the recommended vaccine schedule for healthy pregnant people and healthy children. The change was made without consulting vaccine experts or staff from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to the lawsuit.
Richard Hughes, an attorney with Epstein Becker Green who represents the plaintiffs, said the lawsuit seeks to show Kennedy’s directive was “arbitrary and capricious,” in part because it did not follow the longstanding process for vaccine recommendation changes and it did not include a detailed explanation on the decision. Kennedy also did not cite an emergency or change in circumstances to justify the move. An HHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the secretary.
I for one will be rooting for Dr. Doe et al to succeed. If they do, that may have beneficial effects beyond just the COVID shots. But keep getting your shots, and vote for the people who will support you in that. We must all do our part.