Day 86 — February 25, 2025
Tragically, for the first time in a decade, America saw a measles death—an unvaccinated child—amid an outbreak in West Texas that has infected more than 120 people, and led to 18 hospitalizations thus far:
This sad news hits amid a torrent of bleak, self-inflicted public health news:
anti-vax conspiracy theorist RFK takes over the Department of Health and Human Services
an especially potent strain of the flu has killed 9,400 Americans so far this year
RFK dismissed the measles death as “not unusual”, and that we have measles outbreaks “all the time” (that is FALSE) while offering nothing in the way of solutions
DOGE has terminated more than 1,300 employees at the Center for Disease Control
under RFK’s leadership, the March meeting to set the strains to be included in next year’s flu shot has been cancelled:
an avian flu outbreak continues to impact the United States
numerous webpages on basic health have been removed from CDC and other government websites
Elon Musk admitted yesterday that U.S. AID efforts to track and prevent Ebola were “accidentally” cancelled by DOGE:
Musk then lied when he said he had restored the program:
All of these (and far more we don’t know about) are the predictable consequences of putting conspiracy quacks and bizarre billionaires in charge of our key public health agencies—with a president atop them who spent all last year promising to defund schools that require vaccines.
How predictable?
Last year, in “2025,” I tried to capture what might happen when anti-vaccination fervor reached the highest level of politics. But my goal was to show how it would play out on the front lines: from the perspective of a nurse trying to keep her school safe. Her name is Steph, and she’s a nurse in a Colorado public school dealing with an influx of unvaccinated kids.
Here’s what I wrote:
“In Steph’s mind, they were all dry kindling, piled on top of one another—which made a single infection a dangerous spark, threatening rapid spread.
Using an Excel spreadsheet, she’d calculate the odds of each disease potentially afflicting a school. Measles was the most likely, with outbreaks having happened around the country in recent years. The flu, of course. Always there—always deadly for some. She read up on the others.
The odds for an individual school remained low overall, she assured herself, especially if everyone followed her prevention measures. She’d added sanitizer dispensers throughout school hallways. She’d posted bold reminders to wash hands in every bathroom, and entering the cafeteria. And she’d made masks available—although no one but the vulnerable teachers and cafeteria workers used them.
But across entire states and the nation, odds were high that some schools would see outbreaks in the coming weeks, and again in the fall. The flood of new kids all at once was just too much, joining other new kids, plus “old” kids and staff with health vulnerabilities. Dry kindling piled everywhere. Even low odds, multiplied across all those bodies and all those ailments, meant people were about to get sick.
Once vaccination rates fell from 95% or so, down to the 70s or lower, the math was brutally predictable.
Which meant that soon, one of the nurses in her network would reach out, sounding the alarm. And their network would respond with all the strategies they’d used during COVID—triage the problem through contract tracing, testing, informing parents of the spread, and shutting down if things got bad enough.
Adding it all up, Steph figured school outbreaks were about to become a national story, even if odds were low for Cherry Fork Middle School.
But as she sat in her empty, quiet office now, that didn’t make her feel any better.
Because she was particularly attuned to even a low risk for one other reason.
Not because she was Nurse Stephanie.
But because she was Mom Stephanie—haunted by a searing memory.
At age two, Mimi had gotten so sick, she’d almost died. What seemed like a mild cold and cough had exploded into a 106-degree temperature and a cascade of alarming symptoms that led to a rush to Denver’s children’s hospital and a ventilator. The look of Mimi in that little hospital bed, buried under all that equipment, chest undulating as she fought to breathe, had broken Steph’s heart for four straight days.
And that’s when doctors first diagnosed Mimi’s autoimmune disease, which made her highly vulnerable to every illness on Steph’s list.”
…
“The next Tuesday, from the same office, Steph led the first regional triage call among Denver school nurses. It felt like COVID all over again, all of them joining together to help a colleague in need.
Spring break for East Denver Schools had ended in late March, before most other school districts, giving the school a head start on infection. The lead nurse of East Denver told the group that several days back, three teachers had first shown cold-like symptoms—congestion, watery eyes and a runny nose. A day later, three of the new unvaccinated kids became equally sick, along with two auto-immune kids. All third graders.
A day later, their fevers had all spiked. With their entire bodies fatigued, the sick teachers went home. And then came the symptom that stuck out from either a bad cold or the flu.
“They’ve got a persistent, raking, hacking cough,’ the young East Denver nurse explained. “Two kids vomited in the bathroom, and a teacher did the same in the faculty lounge.”
Steph nodded, guessing where this was going.
“Most of their coughs are followed by a high-pitched intake of air.”
And that was the tip-off.
The next day, tests confirmed the hunch Steph and other nurses had shared on the call. East Denver had a whooping cough outbreak, and had to shut down. Too many teachers reported in sick and substitutes kept turning down last-minute assignments to fill in.
“If it’s already happening in East Denver, this is going to get ugly fast,” Steph said on a call Thursday morning. The math was inevitable, as her calculations had shown.
She was right.
Stories from beyond Colorado popped up all week—first in newspapers, then the local news, then the nightly news. Like a rolling wave, each day brought more stories. And fear.
The Denver nurses started meeting on a 7:30 Zoom each morning. Checking in on one another. Sharing best practices, and what they were hearing. It was hard to keep up.
Measles broke out in schools in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Texas. Whooping cough in Oklahoma and Florida. Both flu and COVID outbreaks rolled through dozens of states around the country. Chicken pox in six states. A middle school in Virginia had to shut down due to meningitis.
There was even a polio scare in Kalamazoo, Michigan. National networks broke into afternoon programming to report the news. Live video of parents rushing to the school to get their kids home safe aired around the country. Parents interviewed, in tears. Tests later that evening proved negative.
Unlike COVID, most outbreaks did not envelop entire schools. And reporters were quick to report this fact. The adults and kids who were most at risk were “just” those with pre-existing conditions. Or because they were old. Or overweight. Or infants at home.
Steph fumed whenever those “it’s not so bad” narratives aired. It reminded her of the loose talk during COVID, from the White House down. As if the fact that it “mostly affected seniors” somehow made things not so bad. Here, millions of Americans had the very conditions making them vulnerable, Mimi included. And too many sick adults—teachers, bus drivers, and staff—meant schools were shutting down for days or weeks.
And unlike COVID, where the entire response—from national to local—could be geared toward one infection, the current crisis involved a wide assortment of vastly different diseases. No community could predict which they’d be hit with, making prevention, testing and containment far more complex.
On cue—because again, the math was brutally predictive—fatalities began to rise, as you’d expect once even small percentages are multiplied by an ever increasing number of infected kids and staff.
Two students in New York were the first. Not vaccinated for this year’s flu strain. Dead.
A cafeteria worker in Florida. Measles, which had developed into encephalitis.
Measles cases in Minnesota, Ohio and Utah killed three more when they triggered septic shock. Two unvaccinated kids. Another who’d been vaccinated, but had a weak immune system due to an early bout with cancer.
Flu and COVID deaths grew. Single digits. Then double digits.
The nightly news shared their faces and names, along with gut-wrenching videos of bawling parents. Unlike COVID, young people made up a large percentage of the highly sick or dead, which was traumatizing moms and dads across the country.
Another crisis was also brewing. One in five measles cases ended up in the hospital, and intensive care for some. Since measles was spreading the fastest, this 20% figure was forcing the entire medical and hospital community to scramble for beds.
Add it all up, and the President’s January order had triggered a countdown on countless time bombs across the country, and now they were exploding everywhere.
And more were ticking.
Some of the worst potential diseases, such as forms of Hepatitis, took longer to spread, and show symptoms.
But Steph knew, they had to be coming too.”
To read or listen to the full Chapter, go HERE.
Share this post