Everything Trump touches dies.
As measles surged in Texas early this year, the Trump administration’s actions sowed fear and confusion among CDC scientists that kept them from performing the agency’s most critical function — emergency response — when it mattered most, an investigation from KFF Health News shows.The outbreak soon became the worst the United States has endured in over three decades.
In the month after Donald Trump took office, his administration interfered with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention communications, stalled the agency’s reports, censored its data, and abruptly laid off staff. In the chaos, CDC experts felt restrained from talking openly with local public health workers, according to interviews with seven CDC officials with direct knowledge of events, as well as local health department emails obtained by KFF Health News through public records requests.
“CDC hasn’t reached out to us locally,” Katherine Wells, the public health director in Lubbock, Texas, wrote in a Feb. 5 email exchange with a colleague two weeks after children with measles were hospitalized in Lubbock. “My staff feels like we are out here all alone,” she added.
A child would die before CDC scientists contacted Wells.
“All of us at CDC train for this moment, a massive outbreak,” one CDC researcher told KFF Health News, which agreed not to name CDC officials who fear retaliation for speaking with the press. “All this training and then we weren’t allowed to do anything.”
Delays have catastrophic consequences when measles spreads in undervaccinated communities, like many in West Texas. If a person with measles is in the same room with 10 unvaccinated people, nine will be infected, researchers estimate. If those nine go about their lives in public spaces, numbers multiply exponentially.
The outbreak that unfolded in West Texas illustrates the danger the country faces under the Trump administration as vaccination rates drop, misinformation flourishes, public health budgets are cut, and science agencies are subject to political manipulation.
While the Trump administration stifled CDC communications, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fueled doubt in vaccines and exaggerated the ability of vitamins to ward off disease. Suffering followed: The Texas outbreak spread to New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Mexico’s Chihuahua state — at minimum. Together these linked outbreaks have sickened more than 4,500 people, killed at least 16, and levied exorbitant costs on hospitals, health departments, and those paying medical bills.
It’s a long story and you should read all of it. A couple of points to note are how previous outbreaks in New York and Washington were successfully contained thanks to significant involvement by the CDC, how the state of Texas didn’t do much to push the Trump administration to take the handcuffs off the CDC so they could get involved sooner, and how RFK Jr did his usual bullshit and how it also contributed to the mess. It’s also important to note those numbers at the end, as they serve as a reminder that this all was and still is much bigger than just what happened in Texas.
One more thing:
To work on the ground, the CDC needs an invitation from the state. But Anne Schuchat, a former CDC deputy director, said that during her 33 years with the agency, federal health officials didn’t need special permission to talk freely with local health departments during outbreaks. “We would always offer a conversation and ask if there’s anything we could do,” she said.
Lara Anton, a press officer at the Texas health department, said the state never prevented the CDC from calling county officials. To learn more about the state’s correspondences with the CDC, KFF Health News filed a public records request to the Texas health department. The department refused to release the records. Anton called the records “confidential under the Texas Health and Safety Code.”
Anton said the state sent vaccines, testing supplies, and staff to assist West Texas in the early weeks of February. That’s corroborated in emails from the South Plains Public Health District, which oversees Gaines County, the area hit hardest by measles.
“Texas will try to handle what it needs to before it goes to the CDC,” Zach Holbrooks, the health district’s executive director, told KFF Health News.
Responding to an outbreak in an undervaccinated community, however, requires enormous effort. To keep numbers from exploding, public health workers ideally would notify all people exposed to an infected person and ask them to get vaccinated immediately if they weren’t already. If they declined, officials would try to persuade them to avoid public spaces for three weeks so that they wouldn’t spread measles to others.
Holbrooks said this was nearly impossible. Cases were concentrated in close-knit Mennonite communities where people relied on home remedies before seeking medical care. He said many people didn’t want to be tested, didn’t want to name their contacts, and didn’t want to talk with the health department. “It doesn’t matter what resources I have if people won’t avail themselves of it,” Holbrooks said.
Historically, Mennonites faced persecution in other countries, making them leery of interacting with authorities, Holbrooks said. A backlash against covid restrictions deepened that mistrust.
Another reason Mennonites may seek to avoid authorities is that some live in the U.S. illegally, having immigrated to Texas from Canada, Mexico, and Bolivia in waves over the past 50 years. Locals guess the population of Seminole, the main city in Gaines County, is far larger than the U.S. Census count.
“I have no idea how many cases we might have missed, since I don’t know how many people are in the community,” Holbrooks said. “There’s a lot of people in the shadows out here.”
We heard repeatedly that the case count in Texas was likely to be short of the real figure, for a variety of reasons including people simply not reporting illnesses in their homes. I did not know about the immigration issue, which of course casts some of this in a wholly different light. I doubt that these conservative cloistered Christians (who I’d guess are mostly white) in a small rural town would be a priority for ICE, but then there’s no reason at all to trust anything this administration or that department is doing. My point is that even in ways you might not have conceived of before, the Trump administration made this outbreak worse through its own malice and incompetence.