The Highwire with Del Bigtree - MEASLES OUTBREAK: THE TRUTH ABOUT WANING MMR IMMUNITY

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Peter A. McCullough, MD, touches on the state of the current measles outbreak in Texas and the alarming rate of waning immunity of those vaccinated with MMR compared to the immunity of individuals who had childhood measles. He also touches on treatments and therapies recommended for those infected with measles.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

The other giant story in infectious disease, the measles outbreak, especially in Texas. You live in Texas, as do I. One of the things I pointed out, it did a very thorough discussion last week on the many studies that show that the MMR may be failing on some level. We may have asymptomatic carriers and not know it. We certainly see vaccine failure in places where there are vaccinated involved. My understanding of this outbreak is it is mostly in an unvaccinated community. so I want to make that clear.

But, you know, they use this fear, this drum beat, and they seem so excited that they finally have a death here in Texas, and it's on every news station. Whereas, you know, you and I grew up watching the Brady bunch, and there was a laugh track around the family catching the measles. Is it egregious to have the media, which clearly has got so much funding from the pharmaceutical industry, to make people this terrified of an illness that is a benign childhood illness is my number one question,

or is this virus changing to and are we dealing with something completely different? You know, our media and public health officials, I think, have to be far more responsible in this type of reporting. And just to level set, our CDC says anybody born before 1957 now, it's assumed that they've had measles. There's just a broad assumption that that's a case. I was born in 1962. I had a single measles vaccine at age two. And I had another one at age 20 when I entered medical school. And that's because I didn't have immunity.

I didn't have antibodies against measles. And now a paper from Bianchi and colleagues from Italy has actually done that exact study of medical students entering medical school. And the answer is about 20% of the. those who took the measles shot do not have effective immunity, according to Bianchi and colleagues. Now, the answer is if they've had measles during childhood, about 6% may not have adequate immunity. So clearly, natural immunity beats vaccine immunity. And now our CDC is reporting as of February 27, 2025, we have 164 cases in the United States of measles in Alaska, California, Georgia, Kentucky, New Jersey, New Mexico.

New York City, Rhode Island, and Texas. So it's not just the Mennonite community in West Texas. And you know what? In last year in 2024, we had 285 cases. So, Delm measles is something that does occur sporadically. It is spread by, you know, respiratory aerosol spread and it's a morbilliform rash. You know, we have other illnesses that have very similar rashes for which there's no vaccine including hand foot and mouth disease caused by a coxacupirus. It's not a big deal. I can tell you what I want to hear as a doctor is I want to hear how did the outbreak start. And particularly if there was an immunocompromised child who is given the MMR vaccine,

that child can actually shed live measles onto others and start the outbreak. This is the first concern. Let's say a child who was on steroids for bad asthma exacerbation. reservation, what have you. There we go. That could be the initiation of the spread. We want to know who's fully vaccinated and who isn't so we can size up risk. You know, and the reporting we got, and CNN did this, and so did the Texas Health Department. You know what they said is they said, well, there's so many unvaccinated and others, the vaccine status is unknown. Well, I can tell you, if this is a big deal, any public health official, you're telling us the status is unknown,

that's not acceptable. That's not acceptable reporting. Tell us what the status is, their public health officials. And lastly, when there's a death for which there was in Texas, boy, we better hear the details. What was the age, gender,

baseline conditions. Were they maximally treated? What early treatment did they have? A child under age one should be getting 100,000 units of vitamin A. That's typically in a liquid. format greater than one years, 200,000 units. Did they get that? Do you know, for high-risk cases, we can give measles immunoglobulin. Did that child get immunosos immunoglobin? And then, of course,

did they get the nebulizers they needed? And what was the final course? Did they die of a measles secondary pneumonia? Right. Or was it mesolence ocephalitis? Were they airlifted into the big center at the Children's Hospital? What was the care pathway? Del, I can tell you, I'm a cardiologist. If we have a patient die of a heart attack in a major medical center, do you know that case is reviewed in detail? That's a heart attack. Yeah. Absolutely. And so a measles death, every detail should be presented to us and yet we hear nothing.

I agree. And that's very frustrating. And this is part of what when Robert Kennedy Jr. talks about being radically transparent. This is a disease that, as I reported last week, if you go to the old vital statistics records, had a death rate of about one. and 10,000 a month infected, one in 500,000 as a sort of population number. So if someone dies, and it's the first death in 20 years, certainly we need more details as to why, because this is an anomaly. This is outside of the world that those that grew up, as you said before 1957, where everyone alive caught this and survived. I've said many times to reporters that

like measles is deadly, and I always say, well, then how are you here asking me the question about it. Like, what do you mean? I said, if measles is as infectious, as you've said, and we all know it is, your parents, or at least your grandparents had it, all the billions of people on this earth had it. This population exists because measles wasn't deadly enough to wipe us out. So we have to be more transparent. We need to look at what's going on. I think that they should be doing some studies right now. Testing, you know, go to a community where you have vaccinated, unvaccinated, where you know the status. And let's do a real pilot study. Let's, test who's got a live infection and who doesn't amongst the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.

Let's start getting to the details around this because the vaccine had promised at one day that it would eradicate measles from the planet. As you're pointing out, if it's 20% you know failure amongst medical students that got the vaccines and 6% amongst those that get the live virus, you know, eradicating this disease from the planet does not look like it's going to happen. And so what's the future otherwise, then? Can we rethink this? Well, there's one more question I have to tell you.

I got today from Denmark on the measles outbreak. And you know what the person asked me? She's a public health official. She said, did the Mennonites have a measles party? Right. No, remember this? Remember, as a kid, chickenpox parties? There used to be measles parties.

Unvaccinated populations may want to just get this over with, right? Because they're going to rely on natural immunity. I have patients who are Mennonites, Amish, other forms of Quakers. And we've always had about 2.5% of the population who take no vaccines. They just don't. That's how they live life. That number, according to the CDC, now is approaching 10%. So, you know, these types of questions, we're going to have to work our way through.

You know, boy, we better have doctors and public health officials and know how to treat measles. You know, the Texas public health official was questioned, I think, by one of the reporters on CNN. And she said, Doctor, have you ever seen a case of measles? She said no. Wow. Yeah, I mean, that's a problem, too. If you don't know how to treat it, we used to know how to treat it. Something that Robert Kennedy, Jr. put out is, you know, vitamin A in the obvious ways to sort of treat it.

I really appreciate your time, Dr. McCullough, and I look forward to speaking again soon. Thank you. Thank you.