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.

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[–] 1 point 4 hours ago

I weep for the immunocompromised. The willfully ignorant however, I have popcorn for.

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  • [–] 4 points 17 hours ago

    It's like a flashing neon sign that says "We're morons". Nobody does stupid like americans.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    "Some specific population groups have low vaccination rates." Oooo! I know which groups. I know!

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  • [–] 3 points 16 hours 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". 🙄

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  • [–] 17 points 1 day 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.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 day ago (4 children)
  • [–] 1 point 14 hours ago (1 child)

    Not really, this is an Amish/Mennonite chronic problem. They would not listen to RFK either way.

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  • [–] 2 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours 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

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  • [–] 11 points 1 day ago (12 children)
  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (11 children)

    Well, killing off stupid people is kinda making the country better.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (10 children)

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

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (9 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 day ago (8 children)

    I’d prefer less dead children.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 3 points 17 hours 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…

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (4 children)

    We have to get a control group for the experiment of breaking up the MMR vaccine somehow.

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  • [–] 1 point 17 hours ago (3 children)

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

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  • [–] 1 point 5 hours ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day 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".

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