The Growing Danger of Measles

Summary

Summary of "Inside the Measles Outbreak in Texas" Episode of The Daily

Podcast Information:

• Title: The Daily
• Host/Author: The New York Times
• Description: Presenting the most significant stories of our time, delivered by top journalists. Hosted by Michael Barbaro and Sabrina Tavernise, providing a comprehensive news overview in twenty minutes a day.
• Episode: Inside the Measles Outbreak in Texas
• Release Date: March 12, 2025

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Introduction to the Texas Measles Outbreak

Kim Severson opens the episode discussing the alarming resurgence of measles in Texas, highlighting over 200 infections, a child fatality, and the growing concern over declining vaccination rates. She introduces her colleague, Teddy Rosenbluth, who delves deeper into the situation.

[00:29] Kim Severson: "A measles outbreak continues to spread in Texas, where more than 200 people have been infected. One child has died, and health experts are now concerned that low vaccination rates will make it harder to contain."

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Why This Outbreak Is Different

Rosenbluth explains that while measles has been eliminated in the U.S. since 2000, recent declines in vaccination rates have created conditions ripe for outbreaks.

[01:41] Teddy Rosenbluth: "Childhood vaccination rates have been falling for some time. This fall really accelerated during the pandemic and just hasn’t rebounded."

He emphasizes that pockets with low MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccination rates are expanding, increasing the risk of widespread infection.

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Origin and Spread in Texas

The outbreak began in late January within a large Mennonite community in West Texas, a group historically less engaged with the medical system and reliant on natural remedies.

[02:58] Teddy Rosenbluth: "The first couple cases started popping up at the end of January... in this population, there is no religious doctrine that says that they cannot be vaccinated. But historically, they have had low vaccine uptake."

By March, the cases surged to over 200, with a related outbreak emerging in neighboring New Mexico. Tragically, two deaths have been reported.

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On the Ground: Experiences in Gaines County

Rosenbluth recounts his visit to Seminole Memorial Hospital in Gaines County, Texas, where he observed firsthand the severe impact of measles.

[05:08] Teddy Rosenbluth: "I was shadowing Dr. Wendell Parkey, the director of the family clinic there."

He describes the hospital's shift from routine wellness visits in the morning to strict measles protocols post-1 PM, including the use of N95 masks.

[05:18] Dr. Wendell Parkey: "The kid may have headache or earaches because of the sinuses being swollen."

A poignant moment includes an eight-year-old girl exhibiting the "thousand-yard stare" typical of severe measles cases, undisturbed even by painful injections.

[06:07] Unnamed Mother: "Can you lay down? Thank you."

[07:29] Unnamed Mother: "No, she’s fine. You’re good, you’re done."

---

Personal Stories: Vaccine Hesitancy Impact

Mother's Perspective

Rosenbluth speaks with a mother who initially vaccinated her first three children but became skeptical after observing behavioral changes in her third child post-vaccination and influenced by community misinformation.

[09:18] Kim Severson: "What was going through her mind?"

[09:27] Unnamed Mother: "There are so many vaccines that you have to get now... We think it's not good anymore."

Consequently, her unvaccinated children contracted measles, leaving her exhausted but unrepentant.

[10:02] Unnamed Mother: "The little one is crying the whole day."

[10:33] Unnamed Mother: "There was just so much fear and so much... I didn't like that."

Ansley Classen's Concern

Another conversation is with Ansley Classen, a pregnant mother fearful of measles impacting her and her children, despite vaccinating one child.

[11:04] Ansley Classen: "I don’t want to catch it, and I don’t want my children in the hospital for it."

Her hesitancy was fueled by misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading her to forgo further vaccinations.

[12:28] Teddy Rosenbluth: "She had seen these scary stories on her mom groups, on social media... she decided not to get her kids vaccinate."

---

Herd Immunity and Public Health Strategies

Rosenbluth elucidates the concept of herd immunity, crucial for containing highly contagious diseases like measles.

[17:49] Kim Severson: "Can you explain it to me? A little bit better."

[17:51] Teddy Rosenbluth: "For a virus as contagious as measles... you get as many people as possible protected against measles so that if one person... you've starved it of oxygen."

He contrasts historical vaccination efforts, which eradicated measles in the U.S. by maintaining high immunization rates, with the current decline leading to vulnerability.

[18:28] Teddy Rosenbluth: "By 2000, vaccination rates were above 95%. It went from something that pretty much everyone gets as a child to something unheard of."

---

Political Influence: RFK Jr.'s Role as Health Secretary

The episode scrutinizes the role of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appointed as Health Secretary, whose stance on vaccines may be impacting the CDC's response.

[19:39] Kim Severson: "Trump appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary... is in charge of the CDC..."

Experts note a muted federal response, with the CDC delaying significant notices about the outbreak.

[20:05] Teddy Rosenbluth: "The CDC only posted their first significant notice about the outbreak almost a month after the first cases..."

Kennedy’s public statements have been contradictory, initially minimizing the outbreak and later partially endorsing vaccination while emphasizing personal choice.

[21:06] Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: "We are recommending that people in those communities get vaccines."

[22:14] Teddy Rosenbluth: "He starts talking about some of the risks of getting vaccinated... Return to the Hippocratic oath..."

This mixed messaging undermines public health efforts to control the outbreak.

---

Public Health Officials' Concerns and Future Implications

Career public health officials view the Texas outbreak as a harbinger of potential nationwide issues if vaccination rates continue to drop.

[23:15] Teddy Rosenbluth: "Experts are really looking at what's happening in Gaines county as a warning sign... at serious risk of these outbreaks igniting on a national scale."

They liken measles to a "canary in the coal mine," indicating that other vaccine-preventable diseases may follow.

[23:48] Kim Severson: "The idea for a long time in this country was that public health meant something needs to be done for the greater good... But we're living through a moment where actually individual rights are in the forefront."

A public health official in Seminole echoes the tension between community health and individual autonomy.

[24:19] Teddy Rosenbluth: "He also said... people have the right to do what they want with their bodies... this is what viruses do when they have enough oxygen."

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Conclusion: A Potential Turning Point in Public Health

The episode posits that the Texas measles outbreak may signify a critical juncture in American public health, where individual rights increasingly challenge collective well-being. The interplay between declining vaccination rates, political leadership, and public trust underscores the complexity of managing infectious diseases in the current socio-political climate.

[25:13] Kim Severson: "We'll be right back."

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Notable Quotes:

• Teddy Rosenbluth [01:41]: "Childhood vaccination rates have been falling... this fall really accelerated during the pandemic."

• Dr. Wendell Parkey [05:18]: "The kid may have headache or earaches because of the sinuses being swollen."

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. [21:58]: "We are recommending that people in those communities get vaccines."

• Teddy Rosenbluth [23:15]: "Experts are really looking at what's happening in Gaines county as a warning sign..."

---

This detailed exploration by The Daily provides a comprehensive understanding of the factors fueling the Texas measles outbreak, emphasizing the critical importance of vaccination and the profound impact of public trust and political influence on public health outcomes.

Transcript

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[Kim Severson]

From the New York Times. This is the Daily. I'm Kim Severson. A measles outbreak continues to spread in Texas, where more than 200 people have been infected. One child has died, and health experts are now concerned that low vaccination rates will make it harder to contain. Today, my colleague Teddy Rosenbluth takes us into the epicenter of the outbreak and explains whether its rapid spread and the government's response to it signals a turning point in how America views public health. It's Wednesday, March 12th. Teddy, welcome.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Thank you.

[Kim Severson]

Like most people, I don't really think about measles being much of a threat. You may hear about an outbreak, but it gets contained. We all move on. This outbreak doesn't seem to be going away. Can you lay out for me why it's different?

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Yes. So part of the reason that you probably don't think very much about measles, even though it's an incredibly contagious virus, is because it's vaccine prevent. It's been eliminated in the United States since 2000, which means there will be cases here and there, but it's not continuously spreading. And so we've seen these other outbreaks. You know, we saw one in New York, we saw one in Washington. But experts are looking at this outbreak a little bit differently. And that's because one, a child has died and two, because childhood vaccination rates have been falling for some time. And that fall really accelerated during the pandemic and just hasn't rebounded. And so in some pockets of the United States, what we're seeing is that vaccination rates for the measles mumps rubella vaccine, the MMR shot, have fallen far below where experts would want them to be. And those pockets have multiplied and gotten bigger, really raising concerns that these once isolated outbreaks are going to travel further and infect more people.

[Kim Severson]

And that's what's happening in Texas specifically.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Right, Right.

[Kim Severson]

So walk me through this. When did it start and where are we now?

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

So the first couple cases started popping up at the end of January. And they were these kids who belonged to a very large Mennonite population that settled in West Texas in the 1970s. In this population, there is no religious doctrine that says that they cannot be vaccinated. But historically, they have had low vaccine uptake just because they don' Interact with the medical system as often as the broader community.

[Kim Severson]

Right. And as I understand, they're much more reliant on natural remedies.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Yes. A long tradition of holistic medicine, that sort of thing.

[Kim Severson]

Okay.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

But the lack of vaccination uptake in that area sort of gives measles the oxygen that it needs to spread rapidly through the community. And so by the end of February, we saw more than 120 cases. Right. And then two months later, we're now up to more than 200 cases. Also seeing a separate but likely related outbreak in New Mexico, in a county that borders where this outbreak has been happening in Texas. And unfortunately, we've seen two deaths related to these outbreaks. So I was really interested in seeing what an outbreak of measles looks like. This is a virus that many people have never seen in their lifetimes. So I started to call some doctors, call some public health officials, and ultimately decided to travel down there myself.

[Kim Severson]

Okay, so you land in West Texas. Take me through how your trip started.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Sure. So maybe to set the scene a little bit, what West Texas is known for is, you know, four things. Cotton, peanuts, oil, and this big Mennonite community.

[Dr. Wendell Parkey]

What is it?

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

It's a 35 year old. So I spent time at the hospital that serves this community, Seminole Memorial Hospital in Gaines County, Texas, which is the epicenter of this big measles outbreak, causing.

[Dr. Wendell Parkey]

The Eustachian tube to clog up. This is Dr. Berkey.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

I was shadowing Dr. Wendell Parkey, the director of the family clinic there.

[Dr. Wendell Parkey]

The kid may have headache or earaches because of the sinuses being swollen.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

And at the clinic, they have divided their day into two. In the morning, they do all the wellness visits. They see the pregnant women, they do checks to make sure infants are healthy. And then at 1pm sort of everything shifts. Everyone puts on N95 masks, and that's when they start seeing the measles cases. And Dr. Parkey, who has worked in the area for almost three decades, he has not seen a measles case. Before this year, he'd only seen it in medical textbooks.

[Kim Severson]

Wow.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

But he has become very good at spotting these cases. And it's not because of the rash, which you might think literally, even if.

[Dr. Wendell Parkey]

You didn't see the rash, you could look across the room and go, oh, man, they don't look all frisky. They look like they don't feel good.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

It's because all of these kids come in with this very distinctive look. It looks like they're staring, you know, 100 miles away, very vacant expression. These kids are sick.

[Unnamed Mother]

She has been very sick already.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

And so I got to see this for myself with one patient, this eight year old girl in the room with her mom. And this little girl did not speak any English. She spoke low German, which is a regional dialect that many Mennonites speak.

[Dr. Wendell Parkey]

So she had the rash like Wednesday or something?

[Unnamed Mother]

Yes, it was Wednesday.

[Dr. Wendell Parkey]

Thursday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

You know, she was unvaccinated and recovering from a really nasty case of measles. And she had that thousand yard stare. And what is she usually like? Is she usually energetic? Oh, yeah, this is a little kid that you would expect to be bouncing around the room.

[Unnamed Public Health Official]

Right.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Of course, bothering her mother. And she was, you know, really not feeling well and not responding.

[Unnamed Mother]

I'm gonna. Can you lay down? Thank you.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

And at one point they go and give her this injection in her thigh which Dr. Parkey prescribed to help manage some of her symptoms. And I'm looking at this needle and you know, it's like two or three inches long.

[Unnamed Mother]

Right there.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

No, she didn't even cry.

[Unnamed Mother]

No, she's fine. You're good, you're done.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

I want to put her bending. And she just stares straight ahead. Doesn't even flinch as that needle goes into her leg.

[Kim Severson]

Oh, my goodness. I have never seen a child who didn't react when they got a shot. I know, that poor kid must have been very sick.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Very.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

Thank you.

[Dr. Wendell Parkey]

Bit, bit shunned. You're welcome.

[Kim Severson]

So what's her trajectory? Like, what happens to a child who gets measles?

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

So the first symptoms that they'll probably experience, a runny nose, a cough, a fever. You know, they get these crusty eyes that look a little red and irritated. And then you start to develop that iconic measles rash, which is these flat red spots that start at the top of your body and spread downwards to cover your arms, your neck, your entire trunk. And for most kids and adults, these symptoms will resolve within a few weeks. But for some kids, measles can be really dangerous. About 1 in 20 kids develop pneumonia, which makes it really difficult to get oxygen into the lungs. You know, some kids have to be hospitalized, maybe even put on a ventilator. One in a thousand kids get encephalitis, you know, swelling of the brain, which can cause permanent damage, blindness, deafness, intellectual disability. And then of course, in rare cases, children can die.

[Kim Severson]

Teddy, you Spoke with the mother of the girl, the unvaccinated girl, who didn't flinch when she got the shot, Right?

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Yes.

[Kim Severson]

Well, what was going through her mind?

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

So this is a woman who had vaccinated three of her children.

[Unnamed Mother]

The third child started acting weird after that.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

She felt as though, you know, after her third child got the vaccine, it turned him angry.

[Unnamed Mother]

There are so many vaccines that you have to get now.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Yeah.

[Unnamed Mother]

And in the earlier years, there wasn't that much. So we think it's not good anymore.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Right. And after that, you know, combined with things that she had heard from the community about the risks of the vaccine, she decided that she wasn't going to vaccinate any more of her children. And as a result, several of her children fell ill with measles during this outbreak. And she was just exhausted.

[Unnamed Mother]

The little one is crying the whole day.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

How old is the little one?

[Unnamed Mother]

Two, three.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Okay, that must be awful. Yes.

[Unnamed Mother]

That's really hard.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

But I asked her whether this changed anything for her, whether she regretted not getting her younger kids vaccinated. Like, did you think about maybe I should get the vaccine for measles or no. And she basically said no. So I really wanted to go deeper to understand more fully how people are making these decisions.

[Ansley Classen]

What's wrong?

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

So I connected with this mom of four in Seminole.

[Ansley Classen]

We have spackle on my toe. Yeah, you have a spackle on your toe.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

A woman named Ansley Classen.

[Ansley Classen]

Can you put your shoes on, please? Oh, I hear hurting.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Yeah. I met her at a park just a few blocks away from the hospital. And, you know, this is a mom who is really scared of her kids getting measles. You know, she's pregnant herself. She understands the risks to pregnant women, to young women.

[Ansley Classen]

I know that there are people that are not going to, you know, quarantine like they need to. And that's really scary because I don't want to catch it, and I don't want my children in the hospital for it.

[Kim Severson]

And are her kids vaccinated?

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

She has vaccinated one of her kids up to one year.

[Kim Severson]

Okay.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

But around that time is when the COVID 19 pandemic started. And that is when a lot of misinformation around vexation scenes around the medical system started swirling around on social media, and she decided not to get any of her other kids vaccinated.

[Ansley Classen]

There was just so much fear and so much just people like, you need to vaccinate, like, just kind of being a little pushy on the topic. I didn't like that.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

And when this outbreak first started, she considered getting the MMR vaccine for her kids. Like I said, she knows that it's a serious disease and there's just, like.

[Ansley Classen]

I said, so much uncertainty. And there are stories that you can read that people like, multiple hours after they got the vaccine, they have had effects.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

But she had seen these scary stories on her mom groups, on social media, on TikTok of kids suddenly dying after getting shots, which is not something that happens or is common at all. Ultimately, she and her husband preyed on it and decided not to get her kids vaccinate.

[Kim Severson]

So, Teddy, it sounds like during COVID when there was so much division over vaccines and that moment when everybody seemed to be in a panic over who they could trust, it was in that moment that Ansley herself lost trust with the broader public health system, which, of course we know is meant to protect everyone in a community.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Right. And, you know, there are lots of vulnerable people in the community that are impacted by a virus as contagious as measles. You know, there are babies who are too young to get the vaccine, there are pregnant people who aren't eligible to get the shot, and people who are immunocompromised who can't build up that immunity themselves. I saw a patient of Dr. Parkey's, a teacher, who had gotten the MMR vaccine, but she was immunocompromised, so she ended up getting just this really nasty case of measles. You know, the rash was covering her torso, it had spread under her hair, her, her scalp was really sore. She was bedridden for a week. And this is sort of the point of public health. It's to protect everyone. And when you're talking about a disease as contagious as measles, this is what can happen. It can spread beyond the people who just choose for themselves not to get vaccinate.

[Kim Severson]

We'll be right back.

[Dana Farber Representative]

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[Susan Lee]

I'm Susan Lee. I'm a researcher and fact checker with the Daily. What I do is make sure details in our episodes are accurate. I also spend a lot of time reviewing pretty much anything a guest on the show says, let's say they're describing the color of someone's sweater. If I find out this person actually wore a blue sweater instead of a red one, I have to make sure that we address it. And I guess some might think that this kind of stuff is trivial, but for us, every single fact in an episode matters. We all make mistakes. We're all human. But my job is to be that extra layer. The daily is part of the New York Times. We do everything we can to make sure we get the facts right. Subscribers make it possible for us to do that. If you want to subscribe to the New York times, go to nytimes.com subscribe.

[Kim Severson]

Teddy how did we eliminate measles in this country in the first place? And I'm asking because these cases are increasing and I want to understand how and I guess if we can stop them at this point.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Yeah. So I think what a lot of people don't appreciate when it comes to the elimination of measles is just how widespread it was before the vaccine. So before it became available in the early 1960s, almost all children got measles by the time they were 15 and about, you know, 500 people died every year. So this is everywhere. Eliminating measles was a really hard fought victory that took about four decades.

[Unnamed Public Health Official]

The end product of medicine's long match with measles, the live attenuated virus measles vaccine.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

And when you think of the COVID vaccine, that's something that was developed really quickly, but that's not what normally happens. They had isolated the measles virus in 1954. They had started doing trials to check the efficacy, the side effects, and they didn't have a usable vaccine until 1963. And then they had to get people to take the vaccine.

[Kim Severson]

Right.

[Unnamed Public Health Official]

Many parents think of measles as just a common nuisance. But physicians today know that measles is more than a nuisance.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

They had to launch these massive campaigns to get the vaccination rate as high as possible.

[Unnamed Public Health Official]

Supplies of the vaccine are ready for shipment to doctors throughout the country.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

They poured funding into making vaccines available and accessible. They made the vaccines a requirement for public schools. The goal was to get as many people as possible vaccinated to starve this virus of oxygen.

[Unnamed Public Health Official]

As increasing numbers of children are vaccinated, we will be well on the way to eradicating a disease that down through the centuries has killed millions of children and left others impaired mentally and physically.

[Kim Severson]

And this is that phrase, herd immunity, Right?

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Right.

[Kim Severson]

Can you explain it to me? A little bit better.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

So for a virus as contagious as measles.

[Kim Severson]

And it's really contagious, right?

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

The most contagious. One person infected with measles can spread it to 18 other people.

[Kim Severson]

Oof.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Yes. So the idea is you get as many people as possible protected against measles so that if one person in the community becomes inf, has nowhere to go, you've starved it of oxygen, essentially, until it simmers down.

[Kim Severson]

And that's what the United States was able to do. Right. It got the vaccination rate high enough, took away the oxygen, and the disease couldn't spread.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Exactly. So the result of this big public campaign to get people vaccinated, the requirements, the funding investment, was essentially that by 2000, vaccination rates were above 95%. And as a country, the US had eliminated this disease. It went from something that pretty much everyone gets as a child to something unheard of. That is, until vaccination rates started coming down. So if you look at the graphs of rates of vaccination nationally, it's gone from 95 to 93%, which doesn't sound like a big deal. But you have to think that this isn't evenly distributed. You know, you have some pockets, like in Gaines county, where you're closer to 80%, which is a real danger zone. And, you know, the more of these pockets that you get, the more likely that these outbreaks are going to hop from group to group. And those falling rates go hand in hand with the mistrust in the system that we talked about. You know, it was always there to. To some extent, but really ramped up during COVID Right.

[Kim Severson]

And of course, there's this other thing that's changed. Trump won, and he appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As health secretary. Kennedy's been a huge promoter of vaccine skepticism, and now, by virtue of his position as the secretary, is in charge of the cdc, which is the leading agency responding to this outbreak. So how is RFK Jr. S CDC doing so far?

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

So, for the most part, during outbreaks like this, state and local officials are managing the on the ground response. And what the CDC typically does is they are out front encouraging everyone to get vaccinated. But several experts I spoke to thought that the reaction from federal health officials this time around has been really muted. The CDC only posted their first significant notice about the outbreak almost a month after the first cases in Texas started popping up. One epidemiologist I spoke to said they've been, quote, shouting with a whisper.

[Dr. Wendell Parkey]

Outbreak in Texas at the moment, in Which a child is reported to have died.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Do you have concerns about that? And then there was this cabinet meeting at the White House in February where RFK Jr. Was asked about the outbreak by reporters.

[Dr. Wendell Parkey]

Bobby, do you want to speak on that?

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

We are following the measles epidemic every day. I think there's 120.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

And he seemed to minimize it.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

There have been four measles outbreaks this year in this country. Last year there were 16.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

He said it wasn't unusual, and there.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

Are about 20 people hospitalized, mainly for quarantine.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

He falsely claimed that many of the people hospitalized from this outbreak were there for quarantine, which is not true. They were there because they were sick. And after he faced pushback from these comments, he changed his tune a little bit.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

Mennonite community. I've spoken to the parents of the child who died. It was a very, very emotional and long conversation with them.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

So he went on Fox News, and he did this long interview. He said he spoke to the Mennonite community. He talked to the family of the child who died.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

At this point, we are recommending that people in those communities get vaccines.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

And he actually comes out and says that, you know, health officials recommend the vaccine for people in Gaines County.

[Kim Severson]

Hmm.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

But almost moments later, CDC in the.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

Past, has not done a good job at quantifying the risk of vaccines.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

He starts talking about some of the risks of getting vaccinated. He says that there are people in the Mennonite community who are, quote, unquote, vaccine injured. You know, again, the risks of getting the MMR vaccine are very low. He even goes so far as to say at one point, we're going to.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

Return to the Hippocratic oath, where doctors are treating patients based upon what's best for that patient, rather than, you know, what's best theoretically for the entire community.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

That's the only way that, you know, medicine should be focused on individual health versus, you know, what he says is theoretically good for the community.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

And as I said, we are recommending that people in Gaines county get vaccines or we are also respectful of their personal choices.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

And so ultimately, he's making a pretty weak recommendation for vaccines and emphasizing this idea of personal choice.

[Kim Severson]

So how do career public health officials view this? What are they thinking about the outbreaks?

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

So I think a lot of experts are really looking at what's happening in Gaines county as a warning sign if vaccines rates dip any lower. We are at serious risk of these outbreaks sort of igniting on a national scale. And it might not happen with this outbreak, but it Might happen next year. And they're not just worried about this one virus. You can think about measles sort of like a canary in the coal mine. When you see an outbreak of measles, it's likely that other vaccine preventable infections are not so far behind.

[Kim Severson]

Teddy, I wonder if we're gonna look back on this outbreak and see it as something of a turning point. I mean, the idea for a long time in this country was that public health meant something needs to be done for the greater good, Even if it's distasteful or uncomfortable for the individual. But we're living through a moment where actually individual rights are in the forefront. Right. We have an administration that's embraced that very idea. And it's to the point where even the secretary of health won't directly encourage people to get vaccinated.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

You know, I think we might be at a turning point even on the ground at the heart of this outbreak. I talked to a public health official in seminole who said he recognizes that measles is an awful virus and he wants people to get the vaccine because he knows it can prevent so many of these cases and hospitalizations. But he also said, you know, this is Texas, and people have the right to do what they want with their bodies. And so if people continue to make that choice and stay unvaccinated, we know what happens. This is an incredibly contagious virus, and we know what viruses do when they have enough oxygen.

[Kim Severson]

Teddy, thank you.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Thanks for having me.

[Kim Severson]

We'll be right back.

[Dana Farber Representative]

Life sustains itself by cell division. So does cancer. Breast cancer cells multiply faster because of CDK46 proteins. But what if we could block those proteins and stop runaway cell division? To that end, Dana Farber laid The foundation for CDK46 inhibitors, new drugs that are increasing the survival rate for many advanced breast cancers. Dana Farber keeps finding new ways to outmaneuver cancer. Learn [e-mail] Everywhere, the New York times app has all this stuff that you.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

May not have seen.

[Susan Lee]

The way the tabs are at the.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Top with all of the different sections I can immediately navigate to that matches what I'm feeling. Play wordle or connections and then swipe over to read today's headlines. There's an article next to a recipe next to games, and it's just easy to get everything in one place. This app is essential. The New York times app, all of the times all in one place. Download it [e-mail] app.

[Kim Severson]

Here'S what else you need to know today.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Today we made an offer that the.

[Kim Severson]

Ukrainians have accepted, which is to enter into a ceasefire. On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced Ukraine had agreed to a US proposal for a 30 day ceasefire with Russia following talks between the two countries in Saudi Arabia. American officials also said the US Would immediately resume military assistance to Ukraine. It was a major breakthrough after a disastrous meeting in the Oval Office in February between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. We'll take this offer now to the Russians and we hope that they'll say.

[Teddy Rosenbluth]

Yes, that they'll say yes to peace.

[Kim Severson]

The ball is now in their court. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the proposed ceasefire agreement now puts the pressure on Russia to end the war. Russian officials did not comment on the US Proposal, which was announced just hours after Ukrainian drones had targeted Moscow. Also on Tuesday, the Trump administration continued its dismantling of the Department of Education, announcing that more than 1300 employees will be laid off. The department will now be about half the size as it was when Trump started his second term. The president has long promised to eliminate the department, but it's a move he can't make without the approval of Congress. Today's episode was produced by Will Reed and Alex Stern with help from Mooge Zaidy. It was edited by Lexi Diao and Paige Cowett with help from Mark George. Contains original music by Marion Lozano, Diane Wong and Dan Powell. It was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brumberg and Ben Lans work of Wonderly. That's it for the Daily. I'm Kim Severson. See you tomorrow.