Anguished parents. Doctors in tears. Utah's long measles outbreak takes a toll.

[milestogo]

(Amy Maxmen | KFF Health News) Kandace Hyland, a marketing director in Utah, was surprised to learn that daycare staff in the state don’t have to be vaccinated against measles, even amid an ongoing outbreak. “I’m nervous sending her to daycare every day,” she says of her baby.


Salt Lake City • Ben Dowse hadn’t expected to treat measles when he became a doctor, but there he was, examining a newborn exposed to the virus in the womb. The infected mother had given birth just hours earlier. The hospital had alerted Dowse to the case before delivery, and he’d braced himself for the worst.

Dowse wore a full-body protective suit with a plastic face mask. As a pediatrician in southern Utah, he couldn’t risk getting even a mild infection, because many of his patients are babies too young for measles vaccines or children whose parents choose not to protect them with immunizations. “I went in looking like a scientist in E.T.,” he said. Measles can cause brain damage, deafness, or death in newborns. If the baby entered the world with a measles rash and fever, Dowse was prepared to give the infant a spinal tap to assess the risk of neurological damage.

Luckily, flushed and crying, the baby looked healthy. To keep it that way, Dowse wanted to inject the baby with concentrated antibodies against the measles virus. To his surprise, the parents objected, promising to give their child “all kinds of vitamin A,” Dowse said. He begged them not to, saying, “You can’t see it on the surface, but the baby’s body is fighting the measles.” They were afraid of vaccines, so Dowse explained that antibodies were different and that they would stop measles from replicating in the infant.

“That shot is going to basically give the baby ammo to fight,” Dowse said. The parents relented. A couple of days later, they left the hospital with a child who had narrowly skirted an infection that killed many thousands of babies a century ago. Nonetheless, Dowse said he doubted they would be returning for childhood vaccinations to protect their baby against a bevy of illnesses. Like more than a dozen Utah doctors and health officials who spoke with KFF Health News, Dowse has adjusted his expectations.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/health/2026/06/15/anguished-parents-doctors-tears/

[JBTaurus83]

1. These parents need to be charged with abuse

This anti-vax shit is ridiculous.

[milestogo]

3. Well, its not going to happen in Utah.

[2naSalit]

12. Or Idaho.

Those religious kooks don't believe things that aren't in their religious books.

[littlemissmartypants]

14. And the kooks, too. 😉❤️

[2naSalit]

16. He!

Just realized my typos!

[littlemissmartypants]

17. Love you, 2na. ❤️

[RockRaven]

2. Fuck you, antivaxxers. Fuck each and every one of you.

Fuck you very much.

[ret5hd]

4. "...sign here and here and here, releasing...

the hospital, staff, and myself of all liability and goodbye do not return.”

[pat_k]

5. Anti-vax parents will probably never face reality.

Particularly those parents of kids who develop life-threatening complications or brain damage. They have to believe they did the right thing, else how can they live with themselves? They are more likely to blame doctors treating their child than accept responsibility themselves.

[RockRaven]

23. The parents of one kid who died recently (I think it was the TX outbreak, but

there have been enough outbreaks that I may be mixing them up, a depressing phrase to utter) literally said they would not choose differently if they could do it over. That is real sicko stuff.

[pat_k]

25. Heartbreaking.

If they believe the lie that the measles vaccine puts their child at risk of autism, and also accept the fact that failure to vaccinate puts their child at risk of death from measles, the most generous view is that what they are saying is that they'd rather have a dead child than an autistic child.

Added on edit: I can't even begin to wrap my head around that

[MustLoveBeagles]

6. I don't understand these parents

If I'd been able to have children I would've done anything to protect them. My mom hated taking me to get vaxinated* but she did it anyway because she loved me.


* She would cry when I screamed.

[Disaffected]

7. Sadly, there ain't no cure for

stupid.

[alimbalt]

8. Re: Sadly, there ain't no cure for stupid

Yes there is - death.

[the nelm]

13. "Evolution in progress..." n/t

[Disaffected]

21. It is but also sadly,

evolution is a very slow process (unless you're a germ or insect)

[littlemissmartypants]

15. There is for psychosis, but the sufferers are not prone to seek it voluntarily. ❤️

[irisblue]

9. There was a measels epidemic in the very late 50s& early 60s in Michigan

2 of my siblings are deaf, all 3 of my maternal aunts had miscarriages.

I feel bad for those Utah kids, the Utah m ed staffers and those damn fool parents are at the DNA wrong assholes

[BidenRocks]

10. Depraved indifference!

Sterilize and jail them!

[LisaL]

11. If only there was something

people could do to prevent the infection.
Oh wait...

[70sEraVet]

18. Are we witnessing the beginnings of the downfall of a once-great nation?

[SamuelTheThird]

24. That began in 1980

[maliaSmith]

19. vaccines

Thankfully I live in California where kids are required to have vaccine records to get into any public school despite what the GOP destroying our country say.

[aggiesal]

20. I suspect we will be seeing more of this in prodimantely (R) areas of the country. Because ...

you know, vaccines are so liberal, woke even.

[cer7711]

22. Parents who refuse to vaccinate their children with time-tested vaccines against . . .

. . . potentially life-ending illness should be fined and jailed.
Period. The end.
We are far too lenient in this regard.
Morons are sending their little ticking biological time bonbs out into the community to infect others.
"Anti-vaxxers": another lamentable item on the list of lamentables our idiocracy has become.

THEM: "My unfounded, paranoid opinion is intellectually and morally equilavent to your peer-reviewed science."
HORRIFIED US: "Uh, no it isn't. Obviously. Stop this nonsense: You're killing people, many of them children."

[cab67]

27. They should be described as they are - selfish.

Very, very selfish.

"I'm doing what I think is right for my family!" OK, but what about all the other families around you?

[cab67]

26. In part, we can thank the Nixon Administration.

Several members of his administration, including Haldeman, were members of the Church of Jesus Christ, Scientist. Because of them, legal exemptions were added to federal policy that indemnified parents if their kids were harmed because medical treatment was withheld for religious reasons.

The current spate of "medical freedom" and anti-vax madness goes way beyond religious beliefs, but had religious exemptions been more closely regulated 50 years ago, we might be in a better place right now.

-----

Full disclosure - my maternal grandmother's family were mostly Christian Scientists. I still have the copy of Mary Baker Eddy's teachings that were on my grandmother's nightstand when she died. But there were also genetic predispositions toward both breast and uterine cancers in her family - meaning quite a few women in the family died younger than they should have.

My mother was no agnostic, but she also knew how to read a family tree. As far as I know, she was the first woman in her family to have had both cancers - but because she was so conscientious about screening, they were both caught early enough that she didn't need chemotherapy. I don't want to minimize what the surgery and radiation therapy did to her, but it could have been way, way worse.

[JT45242]

28. Different approach but punitive to anti-vaxxers

If you choose not to vaccinate your children, the you are choosing to

a) forfeit the ability of your children to attend any public school
b) forfeit the ability to go to any private school that wants to accept state or federal funding for ANYTHING (no title monies of any sort for transportation, books, etc)
c) forfeit the ability to have health insurance through your employer
d) forfeit the ability to have health insurance through the ACA exchanges
e) forfeit the ability to have medical debt extended through payment plans longer than 1 year. Maximum payments of 50% of income until the debt is paid in full.
f) forfeit the ability to have medical debt forgiven in bankruptcy
g) An exception will be made for ER to not provide services to people not vaccinated against polio, measles, etc. (let some super intelligent medical people decide the list, the first two are non-negotiable). They will divert the patients to a quarantine site until the patient recovers based on medical interventions that the family can pay for in advance, resolves on their own without treatment because the family could not pay, or the patient dies (like a modern day leper colony).


Basically you must home school your kids on your dime. If they get sick, you will be financially responsible for paying it at rates that are punitive because your idiot self will not be allowed to bankrupt the health care system.

Perhaps these idiots should read a sermon by Leslie Weatherhead from the middle of WW2.

"I am quite sure that the battle against disease is the will of God, and I thank
God for all those people who are taking part in it. In olden days in this country,
wolves used to descend from the woods upon a village and do a great deal of harm.
But our sturdy forefathers did not call the invasion of the wolves "the will of God."
They called up all their resources, and they "liquidated" the wolves. When the
community is set upon by an invasion of germs, that is not the will of God. The
situation is just the same. You may tell me that the animals are smaller and the germs of disease can be seen only through a microscope, but the problem is the same, and
the battle is the same. I cannot understand how anybody who has read the New
Testament can ever stand at the bedside of a patient, and without explaining
himself, utter the pathetic complaint that disease is the will of God. I always imagine
that Jesus would speak with anger about such a thoughtless dictum. When a woman
was brought to him who had been ill for a long time, he spoke of her as "this woman
... whom Satan hath bound, lo, those eighteen years." Satan! As far as I can
understand Jesus' attitude, but in the words he spoke and the healing miracles he so
gloriously wrought, he always regarded disease as part of the kingdom of evil, and
with all his powers he fought it and instructed his followers to do the same."

From the Circumstantial Will of God Sermon 2 in a 5 part series (emphasis added by me)

[marble falls]

29. Thank you RFK Jr, you fucking bastard.