Measles cases reported in Texas as vaccine rates against the disease has fallen

“Measles cases reported in Texas as vaccine rates against the disease has fallen” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

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At least four cases of measles, including two involving school-aged children, have been reported in Texas in less than two weeks, putting state health agencies on alert.

For some communities, this is the first case of measles in more than 20 years.

Laura Anton, spokesperson for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said the agency sent out an alert to health providers statewide once measles were confirmed to be found in two adult residents in Harris County last week.

The alert stated that both individuals reside in the same household and were unvaccinated against measles. These were the first confirmed cases of measles reported in Texas since 2023, when two were reported.

Measles is a highly contagious airborne disease. General symptoms may include fever, cough, runny nose, watery eyes, and a full-body rash. This disease can cause serious health consequences and even death, especially for young and unvaccinated children.

About 1 in 5 unvaccinated people in the U.S. who get measles will be hospitalized, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Up to three of every 1,000 children who become infected with measles may die from respiratory and neurologic complications.

Houston Health Department officials say the cases of measles were associated with the pair’s recent international travel and released a list of possible locations and dates where members of the public might have been exposed.

The state health agency also confirmed two measles cases in the South Plains, both involving school-aged children who were not vaccinated. Anton said they were hospitalized and have since been discharged.

Katherine Wells, the Lubbock Health Department’s health director, said the children were treated at a Lubbock health care facility. They were from the area, but not Lubbock residents. Wells said at this time, there are no known sites of exposure outside the health care facility where they were tested. Since Lubbock is the medical hub for the South Plains, they traveled to Lubbock for testing.

“We’re working with the South Plains Public Health District and our medical partners to work and identify where there could have been some community exposures,” Wells said. The state health agency is helping with the disease investigation in Lubbock and the South Plains region.

Wells said the community should be aware of the cases, as well as health care professionals who see rashes or high fevers from their patients.

“We want people to know there were some cases here,” Wells said. “So if they have concerns and are unvaccinated, call your health provider or the health department for more information.”

Wells said that the last measles case in Lubbock County was in 2004.

Austin Public Health has also sent an alert about the potential measles outbreak, urging residents to take proactive measures to protect themselves and their families. The last confirmed measles case in the city of Austin was in December 2019.

“Vaccination is our best defense against measles and other preventable diseases,” said Desmar Walkes, medical director and health authority for Austin/Travis County. “By staying up to date on vaccinations, we not only protect ourselves but also the most vulnerable members of our community.”

The recent upswing in cases statewide comes as the measles vaccination rate among kindergarteners has dropped, from almost 97% in the 2019-2020 school year to 94.3% in 2023-24. Texas is among the majority of states that have seen vaccination declines since the pandemic.

In March 2024, there were already more reported cases of measles than in all of 2023, according to the CDC.

A result of the country’s vaccination program, measles was officially eliminated from the United States in 2000, meaning the disease has not spread continuously for over 12 months.

Experts recommend that children get the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine in two doses: the first between 12 months and 15 months of age and the second between 4 and 6 years old. One dose is about 93% effective at preventing measles infection, and two doses are about 97% effective.

Other diseases considered long-forgotten are also now making a comeback.

Whooping cough is returning to pre-pandemic levels. Polio, another disease thought to be eradicated, was detected in New York State wastewater in 2022.

Vaccine proponents fear statewide disease trends will worsen as Texas lawmakers this legislative session try to weaken vaccine mandates and more families opt out of immunizations.

Since 2018, the requests to the Texas Department of State Health Services for an exemption form have doubled from 45,900 to more than 93,000 in 2024.

Lawmakers have filed more than 20 vaccination-related bills, including a House joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Texas Constitution to preserve Texans’ right to refuse vaccination.

President Donald Trump’s re-election and his selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his choice for U.S. Health and Human Services secretary has boosted the vaccine choice movement. Kennedy has previously made controversial comments about vaccines, which include linking them to autism in children.

During his confirmation hearing this week, U.S. Senators questioned his trip to Samoa in 2019, months before 83 people, mostly children, died of a measles outbreak there.

Kennedy has recently walked back some of his statements during the hearing, saying he is not “anti-vax” but “pro-safety” when asked to clarify his stance on vaccines.

“I support the measles vaccine. I support the polio vaccine. I will do nothing as HHS secretary that makes it difficult or discourages people from taking anything,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/30/texas-measles-vaccinations-schools/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

SUMMARY: A tragic midair collision between a passenger plane and an army helicopter near Reagan National Airport, Washington, D.C., has resulted in the recovery of at least 28 bodies. Recovery efforts, complicated by icy waters, strong winds, and upcoming bad weather, are expected to take several days. The American Airlines flight had 60 passengers and four crew members, including world champion figure skaters returning from a competition. The military aircraft was a Blackhawk helicopter with three soldiers aboard. Investigators are expanding the crime scene as debris is found floating in the water, complicating recovery efforts further.

There were 60 passengers and four crew members on the American Airlines flight and three soldiers aboard a training flight on the Blackhawk helicopter. Investigators do not believe anyone survived the crash.

Source

Last week, the federal Department of Homeland Security reversed longtime policies restricting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection arrests in certain locations including churches, schools, and hospitals.

The department’s announcement has sparked fierce pushback from immigrant advocates, school officials, and faith leaders. For decades, some religious activists have used houses of worship as “sanctuaries” to shelter migrants in danger of deportation. DHS’ policy reversal came swiftly after Trump’s inauguration and is part of the administration’s efforts to ramp up removal of undocumented people, with daily ICE arrests quickly rising to more than 1,000, per the agency. An Atlanta man was already arrested by immigration agents outside his church. 

David Brockman is a Christian theologian and author based in Fort Worth. He is a nonresident scholar in the Religion and Public Policy Program at Rice University’s Baker Institute and teaches at Texas Christian University, and he’s contributed regularly to the Texas Observer’s coverage of religion.

Earlier this week, the Observer spoke with Brockman about the federal policy change, the First Amendment, and what Christians should do now.

TO: Now that ICE agents are allowed to arrest immigrants in churches, what do you think this shift signals for U.S. society and for Christianity in the U.S.?

To be honest, the very first thing I thought of when I heard about this policy change was the extreme irony. I’ve been studying Christian nationalism for the past 10 years, and one of the common claims by Christian nationalists about church-state separation—if they’re not outright denying that it exists at all—is they will call back to the idea that the wall of separation is a one-way wall that is meant only to keep the government out of the church, not to keep the church out of government. It’s a common claim that they make. With this change of policy, the president they support is potentially sending government agents into the churches, synagogues, mosques, and so forth to seize and arrest worshippers. That’s not keeping the government out of the church. I found that very ironic, to say the least. 

For the U.S. as a whole, this policy signals a return to some of the cruel and shameful policies that we’ve seen in our history, like the forced expulsion and resettlement of Native Americans in the Trail of Tears, or the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. It’s the same order of shamefulness, and it’s rousting people out of their homes and livelihoods for no real justifiable reason. I know that many of the defenders claim that the people they’re arresting and deporting are violent criminals, but even their own statistics don’t show that. So, that’s a very flimsy excuse. For Christianity, I think that this policy means the end, at least for now, of any kind of separate sacred space, a kind of religious realm that’s off-limits to the government and enshrined by the First Amendment. The implications of that also are troubling. 

If the government can invade sacred space and seize worshipers, what’s to keep it from dictating what can and cannot be preached, what people should or shouldn’t believe, and so on? I don’t generally like slippery-slope arguments, but I think this does have greater implications for religious life than just whether some undocumented people are arrested in a church setting. I think this does not bode well for the future of religion in the United States.

For Christian nationalists who are okay with ICE coming into churches, when do they want the government out of their churches? 

Again, that’s that irony that I was talking about before. Christian nationalists have complained about the Johnson Amendment keeping them from being able to endorse political candidates from the pulpit. Essentially they feel it is keeping them from being able to preach what they want to preach. But I think that we have a situation here where, through their endorsement of President Trump, they’re de facto endorsing government interference with the church—the very government interference with the church that they’ve complained about in the past, and government interference of a worse form. 

What does the Bible say about how Christians should treat immigrants? 

The Bible is a big book. It’s really a collection of books. The Bible can be used to prove just about anything, and it has been used to prove all sorts of crazy things in the past. But I think that serious students of the Bible—Jewish and Christian alike—if they sit down and read through the biblical texts, they’ll see running throughout the Bible the duty to care for the stranger, alongside widows and orphans, and other vulnerable people. One of the key stories in the Torah, that is the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, is the story of the ancient Israelites themselves being migrants, living in a foreign land. They migrated from their homeland to Egypt to escape a famine. It’s a very similar kind of situation to migrants that we see today who are fleeing famine or violence, warfare. There’s this theme that you just can’t miss in the Bible that we are to care for the stranger in our midst. For Christians, that’s something that’s commanded of us. That’s kind of the bottom line. 

There are all sorts of practical questions that come from that. How do we care for them? Does that mean that we just have a wide open border in which anybody can move around with no restrictions? Those are separate questions that have to be dealt with. But the bottom line is that Christians are supposed to care for the stranger among us. 

Other than the irony, what else did you think, as a theologian, when you saw the announcement about ICE enforcement in churches?

I just feel a deep sense of grief, sadness, and I guess this is not so much as a theologian, but as a student of the history of Christian theology and of Christianity. President Trump could not have won reelection without the enthusiastic support of conservative Christian and evangelical voters. Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and his threats of mass deportations were crystal clear during the runup to the election. So conservative and evangelical Christians who supported Trump had to know that something like this was going to happen—not necessarily raids on churches and schools, but maybe raids on workplaces and so forth. He talked about that in the past, and if they didn’t know about it, if this is a surprise to them, they just weren’t paying attention prior to the election. One of the things that I grieve about is that what we see here is a kind of echo of other shameful episodes in Christianity’s past: the Crusades, antisemitic pogroms in Europe, biblical defenses of American slavery by Christians. 

I think that too often throughout Christianity’s history, Christians have been tempted by—what do we call it?—I guess the siren song of power. Tempted by the desire for power over others, to stray from Jesus. 

How do you see churches and faith community leaders like Bishop Mariann Budde organizing to protect parishioners or pushing back?

We’ve had this fire hose of executive orders and we’re all struggling to figure out what the state of play is. I think there’s going to be a kind of discernment process where religious organizations are going to have to figure out what to do. I think it will help to hear from denominational leadership bodies like the National Council of Catholic Bishops or the United Methodist Church Council of Bishops. What may be needed right now is a kind of declaration—from particularly the mainline Protestant churches in the United States, like the Barmen Declaration. Let me give you a little context for that. Do you know what I’m talking about? 

I don’t think I do. 

Basically, in Germany, after Hitler took over, many German Christians willingly subordinated their theology, and they even regarded Hitler as a prophet. They were countered by a group of Protestant clergy and theologians that called themselves the Confessing Church, who were horrified by the church bowing down before Hitler. They collectively issued a declaration. It was more or less a statement of principle in opposition to bowing down before any earthly rulers, including Hitler. The point of the declaration was to say “We Christians are not bowing down to this new Nazi regime, we intend to stay faithful to what we understand to be the gospel, and if that puts us at odds with political authorities, so be it.” 

The major religious bodies in our country will need to come together and declare their fidelity to the basic core teachings of Christianity. I’m not equating Trump with Hitler, or saying we’re in the same boat right now. But I do think that this is something that Christians should be considering right now: a united statement to show the Trump administration that it does not have the support of all Christians. Not that that will not do anything politically, but at least the administration will be on notice of where many Christians stand. What would be even better would be to cross religious lines as well, to include Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and other religious groups. I think that’s something that Christians need to think seriously about.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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