Texas health authorities today announced the death of a child who tested positive for measles, setting off a spate of media reports blaming the measles outbreaks in Texas in New Mexico on declining vaccination rates.
Some doctors and scientists pushed back, saying too little information about the child’s health has been released so far to assume that a measles vaccine would have prevented the death.
The Texas Department of State Health Services (Texas DSHS) reported what it called “the first death from measles in the ongoing outbreak in the South Plains and Panhandle regions.”
The health department said the child was “school-aged,” unvaccinated, had been hospitalized in Lubbock last week and “tested positive for measles.”
Texas DSHS did not disclose the child’s sex, age, general health status or medical history. The agency also did not say what course of treatment the child received after being diagnosed with measles, or what strain of measles the child had.
The Associated Press (AP), under the headline, “An unvaccinated child has died in the Texas measles outbreak,” reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed the child’s death is the first measles death in the U.S. since 2015.
Other media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, reposted the AP’s report, which noted that vaccination rates have declined since the COVID-19 pandemic and most states are now below “the level needed to protect communities against measles outbreaks.”
But Brian Hooker, Ph.D., Children’s Health Defense (CHD) chief scientific officer, said it’s too early to assume that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, which targets measles, would have prevented the child’s death.
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