South Florida sees second case of measles as U.S. outbreak continues. What to know
A child in Broward County has become the second confirmed case of measles in South Florida in the last two months, state records showed.
The newest case was confirmed to be a child who is less than 5 years old and contracted the virus outside the United States, according to the Florida Department of Health's Reportable Diseases Frequency Report. It was reported in April, and no other information was released.
In early March, the state's first measles case was confirmed in Miami-Dade County from a teen who attends Palmetto Senior High. The U.S. has recorded more than 1,000 cases of the disease in 2025.
READ MORE: Are you at risk for measles? Miami sees case amid U.S. outbreak. What to know in Florida
How does measles spread?
Measles can spread through coughing, sneezing and by touching infected surfaces. For those who are vaccinated, infection is rare. For those who previously had measles, you can't get the infection again.
What are the symptoms?
According to Florida's health department, measles can be transmitted four days before symptoms start. Symptoms can appear 7 to 14 days after contact with the virus. At first, they are similar to a normal cold and can include cough, runny nose, red and watery eyes, and a high fever up to 105 degrees.
Red spots and bumps then appear on the face, spreading to the neck, chest, legs, arm and feet. The rash typically appears three to five days after the first symptoms.
What to do if exposed or diagnosed
▪ If you're vaccinated for measles, it's rare that you'll fall ill but you should still notify your doctor and monitor for symptoms. However, if you're not vaccinated or have never previously had measles, speak with your doctor about getting the MMR vaccine.
▪ If you get the vaccine within 72 hours after initial exposure, it could provide some protection against the disease or help you have a milder illness, the CDC says.
▪ Health experts recommend people contact their doctors for guidance if they were exposed to measles. To reduce the risk of exposing others, don't show up at the doctor's office without notifying the office beforehand. Telehealth appointments are another option. To reduce the risk of spreading the disease, doctors also recommended that people avoid visiting an ER for a diagnosis unless they have another medical emergency.
▪ If you have measles, the CDC recommends staying home for four days after developing the rash to reduce your risk of spreading the virus to others. At home: wash your hands frequently, cover your mouth and nose with a tissue when you cough or sneeze, don't share drinks or eating utensils and disinfect frequently touched surfaces.
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Washington Post
2 hours ago
- Washington Post
How one meeting in 2020 and a GOP senator helped create RFK Jr.'s vaccine wreck
In more than 20 years of covering policy, I have witnessed some crazy stuff. But one episode towers above the rest in sheer lunacy: the November 2020 meeting of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Sounds boring? Usually, maybe. But that meeting was when the committee's eminent experts, having considered a range of vaccine rollout strategies, selected the plan that was projected to kill the most people and had the least public support. In a survey conducted in August 2020, most Americans said that as soon as health-care workers were inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine, we should have started vaccinating the highest-risk groups in order of their vulnerability: seniors first, then immunocompromised people, then other essential workers. Instead of adopting this sensible plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee decided to inoculate essential workers ahead of seniors, even though its own modeling suggested this would increase deaths by up to 7 percent. Why did they do this? Social justice. The word 'equity' came up over and over in the discussion — essential workers, you see, were more likely than seniors to come from 'marginalized communities.' Only after a backlash did sanity prevail. I've thought a lot about that meeting as I've watched the havoc Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wreaking as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services — including, most recently, firing all the members of the ACIP panel and replacing them with advisers more to his liking. That 2020 committee meeting was one of many widely publicized mistakes that turned conservatives against public health authorities. It wasn't the worst such mistake — that honor belongs to the time public health experts issued a special lockdown exemption for George Floyd protesters. And of course, President Donald Trump deserves a 'worst supporting actor' award for turning on his own public health experts. But if you were a conservative convinced that 'public health' was a conspiracy of elites who cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives — well, there was our crack team of vaccine experts, proudly proclaiming that they cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives. This is one of the reasons we now have a health and human services secretary who has devoted much of his life to pushing quack anti-vaccine theories. That's not to say that public health experts deserve all of the blame. They don't even deserve most of the blame, which properly belongs to Trump, who appointed Kennedy to curry favor with Kennedy's supporters, and to the Republican senators who confirmed Kennedy to curry favor with Trump. When Kennedy was being considered for the nomination, I interviewed Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute about what that might mean for HHS. Levin, a former George W. Bush staffer who worked on health-care policy, said that as secretary, Kennedy would have significant power to shape our vaccination policy, thanks to his control over advisory boards such as ACIP. 'In practice, the secretary can more or less remove and add individuals to these advisory boards at his discretion,' Levin told me. I concluded that column by begging senators not to confirm him. For a moment it looked as if they might actually put principle over party. On Feb. 3, our Editorial Board praised Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) for the probing questions he asked during Kennedy's confirmation hearing, pressing him to admit that there's no good evidence vaccines cause autism. The next day, Cassidy, who is a medical doctor, made one of the clearest and most forthright defenses of vaccination in a speech on the Senate floor: 'Vaccines save lives. They are safe. They do not cause autism. There are multiple studies that show this. They are a crucial part of our nation's public health response.' Alas, he said those things while explaining why he was voting to confirm Kennedy. His excuse was that Kennedy had promised that he was committed to vaccination … including to maintain ACIP 'without changes.' Now Levin's warning has proven prophetic. Kennedy's ACIP moves were entirely predictable to anyone who has read his book 'Vax-Unvax.' If Cassidy believed Kennedy's assurances, he was a fool, and if he didn't, he's a disgrace to his office. Not all the ACIP appointments are terrible, and one could argue that the board is now better positioned to reestablish credibility with vaccine-skeptical conservatives, something Cassidy talked about in his floor speech. But I'm afraid I can't make that argument very convincingly. Two of his appointments, Vicky Pebsworth and Robert Malone, are known for their hostility to vaccines. Most of the rest seem to be experts in fields other than vaccination. Vaccination specialists, of course, tend to have a long paper trail of public disagreement with Kennedy's theories. I'm no believer in blind deference to experts. Science isn't an answer; it's a process, and sometimes that process spits out answers that have to be revised. But I agree with Cassidy that vaccines are one of the greatest public health achievements in humanity's history. The evidence is clear that they protect millions of Americans from diseases that can kill or cripple. So if it's a choice whether to trust my health to experts who might recommend a somewhat suboptimal vaccination schedule to score political points, or to experts selected by a guy who has casually suggested that the polio vaccine has killed more people than polio, well, that's not a hard decision. And it shouldn't have been hard for Republicans to spare us that decision, either. Instead they made the same mistake as that ACIP committee, only more so: They let politics get in the way of the job they'd been given by the American public. Before writing this column, I re-listened to a recording of that 2020 committee meeting. Almost five years on, it remains equal parts enraging and mystifying. During the brief discussion period — the committee had allocated a full 10 minutes for deciding who would live or die — the panel's members didn't seem to have much to say, other than 'equity good.' But each of them said it anyway, commending one another on their high ethical standards before voting to condemn thousands of innocent people to death. The speeches were wholly unnecessary, except as a signal to fellow experts, who were then caught up in the moral fervor of America's racial reckoning. Listening, I wondered whether any of them harbored private qualms at the time, even as they publicly declared their fealty to the politics of the moment. I wonder, too, whether any of them now wake up at night, blushing in shame and humiliation, as they remember what they did, and the pompous, self-congratulatory little speech they gave about it. And that's also the question I'd really like to ask Cassidy.
Yahoo
20 hours ago
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Bill Cassidy Blew It
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. It's easy to forget that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s assault on vaccines—including, most recently, his gutting of the expert committee that guides American vaccine policy—might have been avoided. Four months ago, his nomination for health secretary was in serious jeopardy. The deciding vote seemed to be in the hands of one Republican senator: Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. A physician who gained prominence by vaccinating low-income kids in his home state, Cassidy was wary of the longtime vaccine conspiracist. 'I have been struggling with your nomination,' he told Kennedy during his confirmation hearings in January. Then Cassidy caved. In the speech he gave on the Senate floor explaining his decision, Cassidy said that he'd vote to confirm Kennedy only because he had extracted a number of concessions from the nominee—chief among them that he would preserve, 'without changes,' the very CDC committee Kennedy overhauled this week. Since then, Cassidy has continued to give Kennedy the benefit of the doubt. On Monday, after Kennedy dismissed all 17 members of the vaccine advisory committee, Cassidy posted on X that he was working with Kennedy to prevent the open roles from being filled with 'people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion.' [Read: The doctor who let RFK Jr. through] The senator has failed, undeniably and spectacularly. One new appointee, Robert Malone, has repeatedly spread misinformation (or what he prefers to call 'scientific dissent') about vaccines. Another appointee, Vicky Pebsworth, is on the board of an anti-vax nonprofit, the National Vaccine Information Center. Cassidy may keep insisting that he is doing all he can to stand up for vaccines. But he already had his big chance to do so, and he blew it. Now, with the rest of America, he's watching the nation's vaccine future take a nosedive. So far, the senator hasn't appeared interested in any kind of mea culpa for his faith in Kennedy's promises. On Thursday, I caught Cassidy as he hurried out of a congressional hearing room. He was still reviewing the appointees, he told me and several other reporters who gathered around him. When I chased after him down the hallway to ask more questions, he told me, 'I'll be putting out statements, and I'll let those statements stand for themselves.' A member of his staff dismissed me with a curt 'Thank you, sir.' Cassidy's staff has declined repeated requests for an interview with the senator since the confirmation vote in January. With the exception of Mitch McConnell, every GOP senator voted to confirm Kennedy. They all have to own the health secretary's actions. But Cassidy seemed to be the Republican most concerned about Kennedy's nomination, and there was a good reason to think that the doctor would vote his conscience. In 2021, Cassidy was one of seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict Donald Trump on an impeachment charge after the insurrection at the Capitol. But this time, the senator—who is up for reelection next year, facing a more MAGA-friendly challenger—ultimately fell in line. Cassidy tried to have it both ways: elevating Kennedy to his job while also vowing to constrain him. In casting his confirmation vote, Cassidy implied that the two would be in close communication, and that Kennedy had asked for his input on hiring decisions. The two reportedly had breakfast in March to discuss the health secretary's plan to dramatically reshape the department. 'Senator Cassidy speaks regularly with secretary Kennedy and believes those conversations are much more productive when they're held in private, not through press headlines,' a spokesperson for Cassidy wrote in an email. (A spokesperson for HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) At times, it has appeared as though Cassidy's approach has had some effect on the health secretary. Amid the measles outbreak in Texas earlier this year, Kennedy baselessly questioned the safety of the MMR vaccine. In April, after two unvaccinated children died, Cassidy posted on X: 'Everyone should be vaccinated! There is no treatment for measles. No benefit to getting measles. Top health officials should say so unequivocally b/4 another child dies.' Cassidy didn't call out Kennedy by name, but the health secretary appeared to get the message. Later that day, Kennedy posted that the measles vaccine was the most effective way to stave off illness. ('Completely agree,' Cassidy responded.) All things considered, that's a small victory. Despite Kennedy's claims that he is not an anti-vaxxer, he has enacted a plainly anti-vaccine agenda. Since being confirmed, he has pushed out the FDA's top vaccine regulator, hired a fellow vaccine skeptic to investigate the purported link between autism and shots, and questioned the safety of childhood vaccinations currently recommended by the CDC. As my colleague Katherine J. Wu wrote this week, 'Whether he will admit to it or not, he is serving the most core goal of the anti-vaccine movement—eroding access to, and trust in, immunization.' [Read: RFK Jr. is barely even pretending anymore] The reality is that back channels can be only so effective. Cassidy's main power is to call Kennedy before the Senate health committee, which he chairs, and demand an explanation for Kennedy's new appointees to the CDC's vaccine-advisory committee. Cassidy might very well do that. In February, he said that Kennedy would 'come before the committee on a quarterly basis, if requested.' Kennedy did appear before Cassidy's committee last month to answer questions about his efforts to institute mass layoffs at his agency. Some Republicans (and many Democrats) pressed the secretary on those efforts, while others praised them. Cassidy, for his part, expressed concerns about Kennedy's indiscriminate cutting of research programs, but still, he was largely deferential. 'I agree with Secretary Kennedy that HHS needs reform,' Cassidy said. Even if he had disagreed, an angry exchange between a health secretary and a Senate committee doesn't guarantee any policy changes. Lawmakers may try to act like government bureaucrats report to them, but they have limited power once a nominee is already in their job. Technically, lawmakers can impeach Cabinet members, but in American history, a sitting Cabinet member has never been impeached and subsequently removed from office. The long and arduous confirmation process is supposed to be the bulwark against potentially dangerous nominees being put in positions of power. Cassidy and most of his Republican colleagues have already decided not to stop Kennedy from overseeing the largest department in the federal government by budget. Now Kennedy is free to do whatever he wants—senators be damned. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
a day ago
- Atlantic
The Senator Who Failed America on Vaccines
It's easy to forget that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s assault on vaccines—including, most recently, his gutting of the expert committee that guides American vaccine policy—might have been avoided. Four months ago, his nomination for health secretary was in serious jeopardy. The deciding vote seemed to be in the hands of one Republican senator: Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. A physician who gained prominence by vaccinating low-income kids in his home state, Cassidy was wary of the longtime vaccine conspiracist. 'I have been struggling with your nomination,' he told Kennedy during his confirmation hearings in January. Then Cassidy caved. In the speech he gave on the Senate floor explaining his decision, Cassidy said that he'd vote to confirm Kennedy only because he had extracted a number of concessions from the nominee—chief among them that he would preserve, 'without changes,' the very CDC committee Kennedy overhauled this week. Since then, Cassidy has continued to give Kennedy the benefit of the doubt. On Monday, after Kennedy dismissed all 17 members of the vaccine advisory committee, Cassidy posted on X that he was working with Kennedy to prevent the open roles from being filled with 'people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion.' The senator has failed, undeniably and spectacularly. One new appointee, Robert Malone, has repeatedly spread misinformation (or what he prefers to call 'scientific dissent') about vaccines. Another appointee, Vicky Pebsworth, is on the board of an anti-vax nonprofit, the National Vaccine Information Center. Cassidy may keep insisting that he is doing all he can to stand up for vaccines. But he already had his big chance to do so, and he blew it. Now, with the rest of America, he's watching the nation's vaccine future take a nosedive. So far, the senator hasn't appeared interested in any kind of mea culpa for his faith in Kennedy's promises. On Thursday, I caught Cassidy as he hurried out of a congressional hearing room. He was still reviewing the appointees, he told me and several other reporters who gathered around him. When I chased after him down the hallway to ask more questions, he told me, 'I'll be putting out statements, and I'll let those statements stand for themselves.' A member of his staff dismissed me with a curt 'Thank you, sir.' Cassidy's staff has declined repeated requests for an interview with the senator since the confirmation vote in January. With the exception of Mitch McConnell, every GOP senator voted to confirm Kennedy. They all have to own the health secretary's actions. But Cassidy seemed to be the Republican most concerned about Kennedy's nomination, and there was a good reason to think that the doctor would vote his conscience. In 2021, Cassidy was one of seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict Donald Trump on an impeachment charge after the insurrection at the Capitol. But this time, the senator—who is up for reelection next year, facing a more MAGA-friendly challenger—ultimately fell in line. Cassidy tried to have it both ways: elevating Kennedy to his job while also vowing to constrain him. In casting his confirmation vote, Cassidy implied that the two would be in close communication, and that Kennedy had asked for his input on hiring decisions. The two reportedly had breakfast in March to discuss the health secretary's plan to dramatically reshape the department. 'Senator Cassidy speaks regularly with secretary Kennedy and believes those conversations are much more productive when they're held in private, not through press headlines,' a spokesperson for Cassidy wrote in an email. (A spokesperson for HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) At times, it has appeared as though Cassidy's approach has had some effect on the health secretary. Amid the measles outbreak in Texas earlier this year, Kennedy baselessly questioned the safety of the MMR vaccine. In April, after two unvaccinated children died, Cassidy posted on X: 'Everyone should be vaccinated! There is no treatment for measles. No benefit to getting measles. Top health officials should say so unequivocally b/4 another child dies.' Cassidy didn't call out Kennedy by name, but the health secretary appeared to get the message. Later that day, Kennedy posted that the measles vaccine was the most effective way to stave off illness. ('Completely agree,' Cassidy responded.) All things considered, that's a small victory. Despite Kennedy's claims that he is not an anti-vaxxer, he has enacted a plainly anti-vaccine agenda. Since being confirmed, he has pushed out the FDA's top vaccine regulator, hired a fellow vaccine skeptic to investigate the purported link between autism and shots, and questioned the safety of childhood vaccinations currently recommended by the CDC. As my colleague Katherine J. Wu wrote this week, 'Whether he will admit to it or not, he is serving the most core goal of the anti-vaccine movement—eroding access to, and trust in, immunization.' The reality is that back channels can be only so effective. Cassidy's main power is to call Kennedy before the Senate health committee, which he chairs, and demand an explanation for Kennedy's new appointees to the CDC's vaccine-advisory committee. Cassidy might very well do that. In February, he said that Kennedy would 'come before the committee on a quarterly basis, if requested.' Kennedy did appear before Cassidy's committee last month to answer questions about his efforts to institute mass layoffs at his agency. Some Republicans (and many Democrats) pressed the secretary on those efforts, while others praised them. Cassidy, for his part, expressed concerns about Kennedy's indiscriminate cutting of research programs, but still, he was largely deferential. 'I agree with Secretary Kennedy that HHS needs reform,' Cassidy said. Even if he had disagreed, an angry exchange between a health secretary and a Senate committee doesn't guarantee any policy changes. Lawmakers may try to act like government bureaucrats report to them, but they have limited power once a nominee is already in their job. Technically, lawmakers can impeach Cabinet members, but in American history, a sitting Cabinet member has never been impeached and subsequently removed from office. The long and arduous confirmation process is supposed to be the bulwark against potentially dangerous nominees being put in positions of power. Cassidy and most of his Republican colleagues have already decided not to stop Kennedy from overseeing the largest department in the federal government by budget. Now Kennedy is free to do whatever he wants—senators be damned.
