Health officials in the state confirmed that the disease has spread to Fayette County, marking the seventh case of the highly contagious illness in Kentucky since the beginning of the year. Previous cases had been reported in Woodfood County.
The life-threatening disease has so far infected 1,267 people and spread to 37 states in what public health experts are describing as the worst measles spread of the century. The majority of those cases are in Texas, where local officials have reported at least 753 confirmed cases since January. Ninety-nine of those cases were hospitalized, and at least two cases—who were unvaccinated, school-aged children—have died. An unvaccinated adult in New Mexico has also died of the disease.
But the virus’s dormant status has been challenged by anti-vaxxers, who have opted against medicating their children in fear that vaccinations could cause autism. One such conspiracist, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has refused to combat the ensuing measles outbreak with vetted science—instead, he has issued guidance that the illness can be treated by simple vitamins.
The return of historically eradicated diseases is thanks to a growing movement of anti-vaxx parents who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories. The researcher who sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and vaccines, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.
But America’s is not the first measles response that Kennedy has bungled. Under Kennedy’s stewardship, the anti-vaxx nonprofit Children’s Health Defense had its own questionable history with the disease. Preceding a deadly measles outbreak on Samoa in 2019, the organization spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines throughout the nation, sending the island’s vaccination rate plummeting from the 60-70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones. That year, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of five.
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