We Still Don’t Have a CDC Director. Measles Doesn’t Care.

America Dissected

Incision Media LLC

Politics, News, Society & Culture

4.6 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2025

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Abdul and Katelyn round up all the latest health news, including: The growing measles outbreak out of Texas RFK Jr’s false claim that the measles vaccine causes death The withdrawal of Dave Weldon’s nomination at CDC, and who could take his place Dr. Oz’s confirmation hearings, and what could be next for Medicare and Medicaid The Covid-era healthcare programs that were extended by the government funding bill West Virginia’s move to ban food additives, including red dye The latest round of DOGE cuts A new COVID variant in South Africa Then Abdul interviews author Charles Duhigg about his new book Supercommunicators, about the ways physicians and public health workers can have more productive conversations with patients. Check out our shop at store.americadissected.com for our new America Dissected merch – including logo shirts, hoodies and mugs. And don’t miss our “Vaccines Matter. Science Works.” t-shirts! This show would not be possible without the generous support of our sponsors. America Dissected invites you to check them out. This episode was brought to you by: de Beaumont Foundation: Find new, research-tested messaging to communicate about public health, plus useful tips for the real-world situations you face, at debeaumont.org. Boll & Branch: Get 15% off, plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bollandbranch.com/AD.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Measles, like all things, is just bigger in Texas.
0:11.3	Trump scraps his pick for CDC director, and Dr. Oz dodges the big Medicaid question.
0:16.6	This is America Dissected.
0:17.8	I'm your host, Dr. Abdu L'Al-Salya.
0:19.6	And I'm your co-host, Dr. Caitlin Jettelina.
0:21.9	And we're recording this on Tuesday, March 18th at 5.30 p.m. Eastern Time.
0:30.5	All right. Let's begin with the Texas-sized measles outbreak that is now spread across to several different states.
0:39.1	It's showing no signs of slowing down, Caitlin. What do you make of this? And what's the latest? Yeah, I mean, the latest count
0:44.5	came today, Tuesday, from the Texas Department of Health and cases continue to increase. This
0:50.7	outbreak is over 300 cases. And we think that the true count, so that's official count. I think the true count could be upwards of four times as much as reported. And not only are we seeing this grow in West Texas, we're seeing it continue to grow in New Mexico. We are seeing seeds of outbreaks then go to Mexico, which now has about 30 cases.
1:14.8	We are seeing East Texas cases. We are seeing Oklahoma cases. And we may even now have a connection
1:22.0	to Kansas. So this is continuing to spread and find other unvaccinated pockets outside of Texas.
1:30.9	I think it's important to recognize the vast majority of cases are unvaccinated and school-aged
1:37.6	children.
1:38.8	Now, it's, you know, I think it's always important to put measles outbreaks into perspective, right?
1:44.7	Measles actually surges every five years for reasons we don't really fully understand epidemiologically.
1:51.5	So even before we eliminated it, even before vaccines, it's really interesting to see every five years there is a surge in measles cases.
2:02.5	But now that we have declining vaccination rates and decline in trust in institutions, we're getting this perfect storm.
2:10.6	And this is not just happening in the United States. Europe just came out with a report that
2:15.9	they had the highest measles case count last year in the
2:19.6	past 25 years. The other thing that's happening and that everyone may be seeing in the news if you're
2:24.8	not in Texas is just other cases popping up. California, Kentucky, New York, Pennsylvania,
	...

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