Texas has f’d around and is now about to find out:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/26/health/trump-state-health-grants-cuts.html
The Department of Health and Human Services has abruptly canceled more than $12 billion in federal grants to states that were being used for tracking infectious diseases, mental health services, addiction treatment and other urgent health issues.
The cuts are likely to further hamstring state health departments, which are already underfunded and struggling with competing demands from chronic diseases, resurgent infections like syphilis and emerging threats like bird flu.
No additional activities can be conducted, and no additional costs may be incurred, as it relates to these funds,” the notices said.
For some, the effect was immediate.
In Lubbock, Texas, public health officials have received orders to stop work supported by three grants that helped fund the response to the widening measles outbreak there, according to Katherine Wells, the city’s director of public health.
But not to worry. Sec’y Kennedy is on top of it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/25/health/measles-kennedy-vitamin-a.html
Doctors in West Texas are seeing measles patients whose illnesses have been complicated by an alternative therapy endorsed by vaccine skeptics including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary.
Parents in Gaines County, Texas, the center of a raging measles outbreak, have increasingly turned to supplements and unproven treatments to protect their children, many of whom are unvaccinated, against the virus.
One of those supplements is cod liver oil containing vitamin A, which Mr. Kennedy has promoted as a near miraculous cure for measles. Physicians at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, Texas, say they’ve now treated a handful of unvaccinated children who were given so much vitamin A that they had signs of liver damage.
Some of them had received unsafe doses of cod liver oil and other vitamin A supplements for several weeks in an attempt to prevent a measles infection, said Dr. Summer Davies, who cares for acutely ill children at the hospital.