The media are overflowing with discussion using an ongoing measles infection outbreak in Texas to whip up disdain for and fear of people who have not taken vaccines. Much media coverage was similar in 2015 when there was what was referred to as the Disneyland measles outbreak. That depiction of unvaccinated people back then, Del Bigtee of Informed Consent Action network (ICAN) explains in a segment of the Thursday “The Truth About Measles” episode of his The HighWire show, turned out to be off the mark.
As explained by Bigtree, the California state government’s later review of the Disneyland measles outbreak indicated that a significant portion of people infected had received a measles vaccine and that much of the measles with which people were infected originated from the vaccine program. Those facts are quite a contrast with what many contemporaneous media reports had communicated regarding the outbreak.
You can watch Bigtree’s five minutes Disneyland measles outbreak segment here. For a deeper dive into matters related to measles and measles shots, check out the complete episode here.
