- Health
- Uncategorized
Experts warn against vaccine misinformation
Earlier this week, health officials urged parents to consider seeking one dose of the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine for infants aged 6-11 months who live in Doña Ana County — the fourth and latest New Mexico county with cases — or who will be traveling to either Doña Ana or Lea counties, where the bulk of the state’s cases have thus far taken place.
Normally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends infants receive the first dose at 12 to 15 months and a second dose between 4 to 6-years old. Dr. Jana Shaw, a State University of New York professor of pediatrics, notes that babies gain some antibodies from measles when the mother is vaccinated, so the recommendation is often to wait until 1 year of age for the most effective protection.
Except when there’s an outbreak.
“If the risk is increased, vaccinating children less than one year of age is recommended; it’s safe,” Shaw told Source. And with no antiviral therapies to treat measles, “the only preventive tool we have is vaccination,” she said. “Once your child is infected, our tools are pretty limited in terms of what we can do to treat, support and help your child to heal.”
New Mexico’s cases as of April 18 stood at 63, with no new cases reported on Friday, according to a Department of Health spokesperson. The bulk of those cases —59 — occurred in Lea County. Of the total cases, 46 afflicted non-vaccinated people; six were vaccinated; and 11 had unknown vaccination statuses. In nearby West Texas, where New Mexico’s outbreak likely began, the health department on Friday reported 597 confirmed since late January, an increase of 36 since the April 15 update.
Nationwide, according to the CDC’s most recent figures, a total of 800 confirmed measles cases have been reported by 25 jurisdictions. The 2019 series of outbreaks totaled 1,249 measles infections, and were the largest in the U.S. since the CDC declared measles eradicated in 2000.
Shaw praised the strong responses from local health departments and vaccination strategies for bringing that outbreak under control, but expressed concern about misinformation’s impact on public health.
“It was through vaccination how we stopped [the 2019] outbreak,” Shaw said. “Unfortunately, we don’t have such a strong intervention in place now, and certainly doesn’t seem to be very coordinated. I’m concerned this will continue to spread.”
Public health authorities warned about the threats of vaccine safety misinformation even before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the concerns have accelerated since then, according to Jagdish Khubchandani, a public health professor at New Mexico State University.
Khubchandani co-authored a 2021 paper on vaccine hesitancy during the pandemic and is currently funded by the National Science Foundation grant to further study misinformation impacts on public health.
“It’s a complicated problem, and I think it needs urgent action at the local, regional and global levels,” he told Source. “We have seen, in the meanwhile, that the rise of misinformation and vaccine hesitancy proliferates at a faster rate than awareness campaigns for vaccination.”
Last updated 3:49 p.m., Apr. 18, 2025
Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our website. AP and Getty images may not be republished. Please see our republishing guidelines for use of any other photos and graphics.
