From the New York Times, this is the Daily. I'm Kim Severson.

A measles outbreak continues to spread in Texas, where more than 200 people have been infected,

one child has died,

and health experts are now concerned

that low vaccination rates will make it harder to contain.

Today, my colleague Teddy Rosenblos

takes us into the epicenter of the outbreak

and explains whether it's rapid spread

and the government's response to it signals a turning point in how America views public health.

It's Wednesday, March 12th.

Teddy, welcome. Thank you. Like most people, I don't really think about measles being much of a threat. You may hear about an outbreak, but it gets contained. We all move on. This

outbreak doesn't seem to be going away. Can you lay out from me why it's different?

Yes. So part of the reason that you probably don't think very much about measles, even though

it's an incredibly contagious virus, is because it's vaccine preventable. It's been eliminated in

the United States since 2000, which means there'll be

cases here and there, but it's not continuously spreading. And so we've seen these other

outbreaks. You know, we saw one in New York. We saw one in Washington. But experts are looking

at this outbreak a little bit differently. And that's because, one, a child has died, and two,

because childhood vaccination rates have been falling for some time. And that fall really

accelerated during the pandemic and just hasn't rebounded. And so in some pockets of the United

States, what we're seeing is that vaccination rates for the measles mumps rubella vaccine, the MMR shot, have fallen far below where experts would want them to be.

And those pockets have multiplied and gotten bigger, really raising concerns that these once isolated outbreaks are going to travel further and infect more people.

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