Measles Outbreak Continues to Spread
WASHINGTON — One of the largest outbreaks of measles in the past decade continues to worsen while health officials across the country wait to learn if federal funding they’ve been using for their outbreak-response efforts is going to be reinstated by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Over the past few weeks, a number of grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal health agencies have dried up, as a result of cost-cutting efforts of the Department of Government Efficiency.
On Monday alone, the Trump administration directed federal agencies to pause the disbursement of $11.4 billion in loans and grants.
According to several published reports out of Texas, the loss of the funds has resulted in the shuttering of several vaccination clinics.
But a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services said when it comes to dealing with the measles outbreak in her state, the funding claw-back has largely been a non-issue.
“Measles outbreak response at the state level was not impacted by the cancellation of the federal grants, [as] DSHS was not using money from those grants to fund the outbreak response,” said Lara M. Anton, the department’s chief spokesperson.
“South Plains Public Health Department (the local health department for the counties with the majority of the cases) said that it had not impacted their efforts either,” she said.
Anton went on to say that while it is possible some of the state’s 254 local health departments have been relying on federal grants to support their measles response, it would be impossible to assess their individual situations without calling each one.
However, those departments are no longer in the bleak circumstances they may have believed themselves to be earlier this week.
On Thursday, Health and Human Service Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., told ABC News that “some programs that were cut … are being reinstated.”
“We’re streamlining the agencies. We’re going to make it work for public health, make it work for the American people,” Kennedy said.
“In the course of that, there were a number of instances where studies that should have not have been cut were cut, and we’ve reinstated them. Personnel that should not have been cut were cut we’re reinstating them, and that was always the plan,” he said.
Dan can be reached at [email protected] and on X @DanMcCue
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