- Texas healthcare officials are cancelling 50 planned vaccination clinics as measles spreads throughout the state. The decision comes as the CDC and Department of Health and Human Services have cut funding, which was originally allocated to communities during the pandemic.
Cuts to federal funding have forced healthcare officials in Texas to shutter 50 planned vaccination clinics in Dallas, one the state’s most populated areas, as a measles outbreak continues to grow across the state.
Many of those clinics had been planned for areas where vaccination rates for measles, mumps and rubella were low. The shots would have been freely offered to families.
The decision follows $11.4 billion in funding cuts by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services. That money, originally, was allocated to community health departments during the pandemic. Last week, however, HHS said it would “no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.”
While COVID is not as big of a concern these days, Texas has 422 confirmed cases of measles at the moment. While none are in Dallas, health officials are trying to protect that city, given how fast the disease can spread.
Due to the cuts, 11 full-time and 10 part-time staffers at the Dallas County Health and Human Services Department have been let go, which officials say could impact their ability to fight the spread of the disease. The majority of those workers either gave vaccines or were epidemiologists and lab staff involved with measles surveillance and prevention.
(Clinics in West Texas, where many of the cases are, will continue for now.)
The cuts come a month after Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine critic and the nation’s top health official, said his agency would continue to fund Texas’ immunization program and that ending the outbreak was a “top priority” for him and his team.