The disease was eliminated across the Americas in 2024, but urgent vaccination drives are now under way as cases rise from Mexico to Bolivia after outbreaks farther north

Governments across Latin America are stepping up efforts to vaccinate their populations against measles, as outbreaks in North America drive a 34-fold increase in the number of cases reported in the region this year.

Measles cases have surged worldwide to a 25-year high, due to low vaccine coverage and the spread of misinformation about vaccine safety. However, there is added concern in parts of Latin America over unequal access to healthcare and the worrying situation in the US, which is facing its worst measles outbreak in decades following a reversal of vaccine policy led by Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.

“The US’s political position in relation to health and vaccination is an outrage,” said Rosana Richtmann, an infectious disease doctor and coordinator of the Brazilian Society of Infectious Disease’s immunisation committee. “It’s a problem for us.”

  • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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    14 hours ago

    So this vid is regarding bacteria, not viruses like measles, but it’s an insanely good illustration of just how quickly evolution happens on a microscopic scale:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8

    This is why finishing your entire antibiotic prescription is so important even if you feel better after it’s half way done: if there are a few remaining cells that are less susceptible to the drug, you want to really overwhelm them so they’re fully dead. Allow them to recover and multiply, and you just bred up a new strain of superbug. We don’t give them a bridge of progressively higher doses for them to adapt to, we go straight to dropping nukes.

    So back to viruses. These antivax dipshits are basically offering themselves and their children up as petri dishes for the virus to not just thrive in, but to mutate in. If a single one of those microscopic fuckers mutates in a way that bypasses your immune defenses granted by a vaccine, then we’re literally one sneeze away from being back to square one with no measles vaccine, cuz the one we have just become obsolete. Fast forward a few months worth of spreading from host to host in a world full of international travel, and boom, there’s our next global pandemic.

    The decision to vaccinate or not is NOT a personal choice: it’s a communal one. Even ignoring the outliers like immunocompromised people who rely on herd immunity, choosing not to vaccinate is rolling the dice for the fates of literally everyone. No needle is that scary - just fucking do it.

    This antivax shit is some of the most maliciously selfish nonsense that humans are capable of.

  • glorkon@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    Imagine being anti-medicine. That’s what being anti-vaccine is in a nutshell.

    Unfortunately, being anti-vaxx also harms others by allowing preventable diseases to spread.

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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      12 hours ago

      anti-intellectual to be exact. plus they fall for pseudoscience quite often. like the flouride-free crowd, chronic lyme nuts.

      • glorkon@lemmy.world
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        11 hours ago

        Yep, being anti-intellectual is the basic requirement. Only then it is possible to be anti-vaxx - because these people cannot grasp the concept of how vaccines work…

        a) in the human body: So many people wrongly believe that vaccines are supposed to make you 100% immune from infection, and when the Covid vaccines failed to achieve this impossibility, they considered them worthless. They didn’t understand how lowering virus count and drastically improving your odds of survival were still huge wins for the Covid vaccine.

        b) in society: People don’t seem to intuitively grasp the dynamics of how a certain degree of vaccination can stop a disease, and that it all comes down to statistics. If you don’t understand science, you don’t even get that there’s a threshold percentage required for herd immunity. So those anti-vaxx idiots don’t understand how vaccines protect other people by helping to achieve this threshold. They literally hurt everyone around them.

        So yeah. Anti-intellectualism is the fundamental building block for all of this, and that’s why the Trump regime attacks education and universities. The less educated people are, the easier they fall for their bullshit.

  • oyzmo@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    Nature is culling the herd -> people who willingly refuse vaccines.

    Edit: true the reply. It really is very sad. I see how my comment was unclear.

    • sfgifz@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      Poor people without access to the vaccine being affected because rich chodes refuse to use it isn’t something to be happy about.

    • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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      18 hours ago

      The COVID vaccine wasn’t bungled though. It was a remarkably speedy and successful use of mRNA technology, and a great proof of how effective that approach to vaccines can be. If anything was bungled about it, it was leaving it in the sole possession of for-profit drug companies so that rich countries would have better access to it.

      What bungling did you have in mind?

      • radiofreebc@lemmy.world
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        17 hours ago

        I got vaccinated. I just feel like this was a perfect way to get a lot of difficult people out of the way.

        • triptrapper@lemmy.zip
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          16 hours ago

          Difficult to whom? Which administration? Most anti-vaxxers (I assume) are Trump supporters. They might self-identify as free thinkers, but they’ve pledged allegiance to anything right-leaning, so why would the far-right government want to get rid of them?

          • MrSmiley@lemmy.zip
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            13 hours ago

            It’s not because they are Trump supporters that make them anti-vaxxers. The stronger correlation is magical thinking.

            Still some small effects of ideology, but they pale in comparison to effects of magical thinking. If you run all of this in a regression equation with the standard demographic controls, the effects of ideology basically disappear once you take magical thinking into account.

            https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/02/03/anti-vax-attitudes-and-political-ideology/

            As for the why would a far right government cull their own supporters? Look at it more of a top-down dominance hierarchy, where the ones at top are accelerationists with malthusian tendencies. They have a utopian vision of the future where they run little technofiefdoms. The people within their borders, their “subjects” are slaves, property to be used and discarded as they please. Those deemed useless ground into biofuel.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

            Civilization, as a process, is indistinguishable from diminishing time-preference (or declining concern for the present in comparison to the future). Democracy, which both in theory and evident historical fact accentuates time-preference to the point of convulsive feeding-frenzy, is thus as close to a precise negation of civilization as anything could be, short of instantaneous social collapse into murderous barbarism or zombie apocalypse (which it eventually leads to). As the democratic virus burns through society, painstakingly accumulated habits and attitudes of forward-thinking, prudential, human and industrial investment, are replaced by a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a ‘reality television’ political circus. Tomorrow might belong to the other team, so it’s best to eat it all now.

            https://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/

            Anti-vaxxers could be viewed more as a means to achieving apocalyptic goals. The power behind Trump doesn’t care what the anti-vaxxers support, only care about their use-value. The same with Trump, he’s a means to an end, as useful idiot, to dismantle democracy and serve as scapegoat.