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.
While Schuchat said that it was “not unheard of” that the CDC hadn’t yet released either a Health Alert or a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report pertaining to the ongoing outbreak because measles outbreaks have been happening every few years, the speed at which this outbreak has grown would typically trigger the CDC to urge people nationally to get vaccinated and remind them of the signs and symptoms of measles.
Other actions the CDC would usually take at this stage of an outbreak would include investigating the outbreak’s source, running genetic tests on the virus to determine if it’s an unusual strain, issuing updated measles guidance for clinicians, hosting information calls for health influencers and communication groups and using social media to remind people to get vaccinated, Schuchat said.
The CDC did not respond to questions about whether it has taken those steps. The agency has not yet posted on its social media about the current measles outbreak.
The last major measles outbreak in the U.S. was in 2019, when over a thousand people were infected in 31 states. At the time, the CDC under Trump’s first administration responded by encouraging parents to get their children vaccinated. Even Trump himself told reporters that unvaccinated children “have to get the shots. The vaccinations are so important.”
But despite big changes to the leadership of the federal health agencies and a temporary ban on agency communications to the public, on the state level, health officials say they have been in regular communication with the CDC.
“On the measles front, our relationship with the CDC remains productive, with regular communication between our vaccine team and CDC officials regarding the measles outbreak and vaccinations,” said Robert Nott, a spokesperson for the New Mexico Department of Health.
A spokesperson for the Texas Department of State Health Services said the CDC has been providing “guidance and vaccines.”
Measles is notoriously contagious — over 90% of unvaccinated people who are exposed to the virus will be infected — and was once a common childhood illness until the introduction in 1963 of the highly effective MMR vaccine, which caused infection rates to plummet. High vaccination rates meant that any new cases had to be brought in from outside the country, and any spread would be contained by herd immunity. In 2000, the U.S. declared the disease eradicated, meaning it had not spread domestically in at least 12 months.
In recent years, a surge of vaccine hesitancy has caused vaccination rates to dip. Because the virus is so easily transmitted, if the vaccination rate in a community falls below 95%, it can result in the loss of herd immunity which keeps most people protected from being exposed to the virus. Only 12 states reached this level of vaccination in 2024. Texas and New Mexico were not among them.
Kennedy’s confirmation as secretary of health and human services has worried many public health advocates. Some fear his history of advocating against vaccines will cause vaccination rates to fall even more, and could impact the role the CDC and other health agencies play in promoting vaccinations and responding to outbreaks. While Kennedy pledged during his confirmation hearings to not disrupt vaccine access or infrastructure, since his confirmation, HHS has indefinitely postponed a meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, shut down an ad campaign promoting flu vaccines and halted the development of a new COVID-19 vaccine.
In a Wednesday cabinet meeting, Kennedy said that he was watching the measles epidemic in the southwest and that “we put out a post on it yesterday.” It was not immediately clear what post Kennedy was referring to.
Kennedy seemed to dismiss some concerns about the outbreak, saying measles outbreaks are “not unusual” and that the 20 people hospitalized were “mainly for quarantine.” The chief medical officer at a children’s hospital in Lubbock, Texas, told NBC that all the children treated for measles were admitted because they were having difficulty breathing.
Sen. Ted Cruz declined to answer a question about the measles outbreak.
But the Democratic senators from New Mexico both said they were deeply concerned. Sen. Ben Ray Luján said that the New Mexico delegation wrote a letter to Kennedy about the measles outbreak, but hadn’t received a response.
“This should terrify everyone that’s reading about it,” Luján said.
Sen. Martin Heinrich said that he sees the outbreak as “a symptom of the last eight years of vaccine denialism and dropping vaccination rates.”
“This administration’s completely untested, and we don’t know what their response is going to look like,” Heinrich added.
One Boston-area health official said that even just the discrepancy between the actions the CDC is taking on the ground and the messaging coming from the top of HHS was causing issues.
“The fact that it’s not consistent is a problem in and of itself, especially thinking about the measles epidemic,” said Bisola Ojikutu, executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission, at an event hosted by the Big Cities Health Coalition. “We’re preparing now, even though we don’t have a case, and we’re trying to figure out who is going to be able to come in and help us.”
“This is a major issue, and we don’t feel like we have consistent easy access” to people at the CDC, Ojikutu added. “They were holding regular calls. We have not been having that.”
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Margaret Manto is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.