Comment by doodlebugging
1 day ago
The spread could be related to oil and gas activity in the Permian Basin. Both Gaines County, Texas and Lea County, New Mexico are in active areas of the Permian Basin. There is drilling and production activity all over the region. The population has grown since the Permian Basin boom kicked off about 10-12 years ago. Workers will move back and forth across the state lines working. That could explain why more adults are affected in New Mexico than in Texas where it is mostly in children. Texas employees with sick children go to work and make their coworkers sick and those coworkers in New Mexico take it home to their kids.
Oil and gas people are pretty conservative leaning and it wouldn't be a big surprise to find that a lot of them swallowed the anti-vax bullshit and are now reaping the rewards for themselves and their families.
The worst part is the immune system amnesia that measles can cause. That could set these people up reinfection by things that they would normally have already been immunized against. Most people over 20 have had immunizations because their parents kept them up to date to keep them in school. The whole trend of unvaccinated kids is a relatively recent thing down here in Texas totally linked to bullshit on social media, radio, and TV.
> totally linked to bullshit on social media, radio, and TV.
There has to be a way to frame this kind of entertainment product as anti-American and anti-patriotic in order to make vaccination more popular again.
Even if we don't turn it into an effort to increase vaccination rates we definitely need to turn back the clock and enact regulations that prohibit concentration of ownership of media outlets so that people will get a balanced perspective.
Maybe that barn door was already open for too long. Prioritizing education seems to provide the best cost/benefit results so that young people graduate with some higher order skills and don't need to be told to look at both sides of a coin, they understand that it is critical to understand competing perspectives in order the know which works best long term.
When all your information comes from one main source you will have a hard time escaping that mindset unless you actively seek out a different perspective. The peer pressure on those who stay near home for their entire lives is pretty high. Maybe the answer is to require military service at graduation or in lieu of that, public service for a similar term in a region outside where you grew up.