Most counties don’t have their own health agencies, and some specific population groups have low vaccination rates

Pennsylvania is bracing for a wave of measles cases, with some public health officials concerned that it’s “only a matter of time” until the disease spreads beyond the outbreak’s epicenter.

Last week the state reported its fifth measles-associated death amid 943 confirmed cases across 39 counties. The outbreak comes amid concerns that public health in the US has been hit by increasing vaccine skepticism, especially due to the power and influence of controversial health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Contributing to the challenge is that Pennsylvania is one of the few US states where its counties mostly lack their own health department, with only seven of its 67 counties having their own.

  • NoxAstrum@lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    It’s like a flashing neon sign that says “We’re morons”. Nobody does stupid like americans.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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    3 days ago

    My father nearly died of polio as a kid. This was before the vax. My mother was slightly younger and remembered getting the vax because it was a big deal. It’s super cool how lunatics are undoing all the progress we made protecting children from diseases. Let’s have more suffering, isn’t that great? Ffs.

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Amish and Mennonite populations have had a lot of vaccine hesitancy for a long time.

      Unfortunately, vaccines are a victim of their own success and people born into a situation in which certain diseases are virtually nonexistent because of those vaccines can craft or fall for a bullshit narrative about how it’s always been like that, and the vaccines were not even necessary “because mah immune system”. 🙄

      • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        They’ve been vaccine hesitant from the outset. However, if you have the general population holding to at least herd immunity levels, you don’t have much of a problem. Amish are .74% of the PA population. I was trying to figure out how many Mennonites are in PA, but I’m not finding reliable results - since they are commonly confused with Amish (and Hutterites).

        What is different now is the vaccine denialism in the wider culture. The idiotic vaccine denialism has been ticking up as older generations (that knew better) die off, but now we have an actual vaccine denialist running the HHS. I’m sure having donnie and him having a platform where they spread absolute fucking nonsense has had, and is going to have, more people opt out.

        This is from a year ago:

        According to the state, 93.7% of Pennsylvania kindergarteners got both recommended doses of the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine before the 2024-2025 school year. That’s lower than the recommended 95% vaccination rate for herd immunity, the threshold to provide community resistance to infectious diseases like measles.

        https://www.wesanews.org/health-science-tech/2025-09-30/routine-vaccination-rates-decline-pennsylvania-kindergarteners

      • OldChicoAle@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        How do you know if the kids are stupid before they die? Intelligence isn’t exactly proven to be genetic.

        • CannonFodder@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          It’s partly genetic and partly how they’re educated by their parents. So pretty good chance they’ll be stipid. Nothing we can do about it anyway but laugh or cry, and I’d prefer to laugh.

            • Hanrahan@slrpnk.net
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              3 days ago

              cars and guns should be your target to ban. They are the two biggest killers of children.

              The Dutch had mass, often violet, protests in the 1970’s because cars were killing kids. They changed their entire society because they wanted less dead kids, Most other nations think dead kids is a fair trade. Something in us is broken

              • LilB0kChoy@reddthat.com
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                2 days ago

                cars and guns should be your target to ban.

                Okay, but if you look all the way up at OPs post the discussion is about a measles outbreak.

                It would be kind of an odd non-sequitur for me to randomly shoehorn my thoughts about cars and guns in America into a conversation about a measles outbreak and anti-vaxxers…

              • NABDad@lemmy.world
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                3 days ago

                Sitting here reading this wondering what kind of shithead thinks cats are killing children. Is it the “cats steal your breath” bullshit again?

                Then I read on. Oh “cars” not “cats”.

              • LilB0kChoy@reddthat.com
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                2 days ago

                I guess you’ll have to forgive me for thinking jokes about dead children through adult negligence and malfeasance isn’t funny.

                • historicaldocuments@lemmy.world
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                  2 days ago

                  I wasn’t joking.

                  With no medical reason and a sample size of several million humans we’re going to run an experiment that will end in a measurable amount of deaths from measles and there are no ethics guidelines. Without a population stupidly refusing to be vaccinated at all we won’t have a good way of knowing what the death toll is.

                  Without all the dead kids contributing to the study there’d be no value in it at all since the executive order’s effects can’t start yet due to lack of an approved MMR vaccine and a legal hold up blocking the order. Since it takes two years for autism to show up after a kid is born, and since the executive order will likely be overturned in January 2029, we’ll have just that small window to gather the necessary data.

                  Don’t mistake my pragmatism for happiness.

  • KulunkelBoom@lemmus.org
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    3 days ago

    Send in KennyDee (otherwise known as Dr. WormBrain) - he’ll eat the infected ones and shit out clean disease free poop with his “no wipe behind”.