New York governor declares measles emergency

Filed 1h ago · Via Stateline · The Buffoon Desk

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Music for Funeral Home - Part 11

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: The White House from Washington, DC · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a state disaster emergency Monday after New York recorded 108 measles cases, its highest count since 2019, and issued an order letting paramedics, pharmacists and midwives administer vaccines. The outbreak comes amid the nation's worst measles year in three decades, with Pennsylvania reporting more than 1,000 cases and five attributed deaths, though the CDC has confirmed only two. Nationally the CDC counts 3,887 confirmed cases and 352 hospitalizations this year.

Attorney General Letitia James also joined 15 Democratic-led states suing the Trump administration over its scaled-back childhood vaccination schedule. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic, has recommended fewer childhood vaccines, and kindergarten MMR vaccination rates have slipped to 92.4% from 95% five years ago. An epidemiologist quoted in the piece noted there is no national campaign urging parents to vaccinate, a gap Pennsylvania's governor has cited in calling for Kennedy's removal.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A disease the country beat twenty-five years ago is back on the map, and the federal government's response has been to loosen the rules rather than tighten the message. States suing their own federal health agency over childhood shots used to sound like dark satire; now it's Monday's news. When the folks running the agency won't say the plain thing, that vaccines work, somebody else has to say it, and apparently that somebody is a governor with an emergency order.

Source: Read the original at Stateline → Scored: Music for Funeral Home - Part 11 · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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