Vaccine Hesitancy: The Catch-All Scapegoat for US Disease Outbreaks

Real science suggests illegal entrants are a far greater contributor.

(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Urban pandemonium and rampant crime are transforming many American cities into seemingly third-world metropolises. Aggravating this roiling mayhem is a flagrant open-border policy that is flooding US cities with undocumented foreigners in street camps and homeless shelters. Alarming increases in reported cases of measles, tuberculosis, polio, and leprosy are all just additional symptoms of these chaotic times. Yet “vaccine hesitancy” from so-called “disinformation” is being widely blamed for these outbreaks by government and media outlets.

Applying the rubric of COVID-19 response to illegals carrying diseases is simple enough – social distancing, masking, contact tracing, and vaccination have long been the tools to combat measles, tuberculosis, and polio as well as coronaviruses. Hundreds of thousands of foreigners from nations with inferior safeguards against contagious illnesses have overrun US borders both north and south, evading traditional protections. Establishment media and government agencies poo-poo concerns that open borders risk resurrecting diseases once thought conquered in America, instead scorning detractors as racist nativists or vax-deniers. “Real science” (and common sense) suggest that untracked and un-vaccinated immigrants may be bringing not just fentanyl and weapons into the country, but deadly pathogens as well.

Disease and Misinformation Outbreaks

The widespread media spin is that measles and TB are rising because of dangerous domestic sources:  vaccine-hesitant US citizens. Common sense and science were jettisoned under the fear-mongering COVID-19 mRNA roll-out, along with liberties protecting free speech, free travel, and freedom of assembly. Americans were told a slew of unscientific lies about COVID-19 and novel vaccines by a government peddling Big Pharma products. This seeded a distrust not just of novel mRNA shots but of all vaccines, all around the world.

The jabs were not 100% safe and effective: They did not prevent infection, symptoms, or transmission. They caused myocarditis and other adverse health problems, and they were unnecessary for healthy minors despite being pressed upon them. None of this led to an increase in trust of either Big Pharma or the government.

It doesn’t help that the children of American citizens are required to be vaccinated against measles to attend New York City public schools in which illegals enroll their unvaccinated kids under an exemption. Meanwhile, vaccine proponents push to eliminate religious and philosophical exemptions for future vaccines, claiming “misinformation” is behind parental hesitancy. This will likely encourage even more parents to keep their young children home to protect them from both potentially infected foreigners and dubious medical “science.”

Outbreaks of varying diseases in Chicago, New York, and Florida all exhibit a similar pattern of government and media bias and misinformation.

Chicago’s Measles Outbreak

Measles is highly contagious, but it was reportedly eliminated from the US in 2000. In order to seed outbreaks, it must therefore be imported, find an unvaccinated population, and spread. Tens of thousands of unmonitored illegal migrants flocking over the Rio Grande are a natural vector for transmission, which is precisely what occurred in Chicago. However, the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) claimed that unvaccinated illegals are the victims, not the cause. “We have no reason to believe that new arrivals are bringing infections to Chicago,” CDPH public information coordinator Jacob Martin told Newsweek. But if the disease isn’t being brough in by unvaccinated migrants, where is it coming from?

“In this case, we believe the opposite, as the first measles infection identified in Chicago was not found in the new arrivals population, and 17 different states in the U.S. are currently experiences an emergent measles outbreak of some kind due to reduced vaccination rates,” Martin continued. “Measles is already here in the United States, but he migrant population on the whole is under-vaccinated compared to the traditional Chicago population and is therefore at higher risk of infection.”

This unscientific conclusion ignores real science. How can the CDPH possibly know how many cases are transmitted by an enormous influx of untracked, unvaccinated migrants traveling from nations where measles is more common? How can it conclude that the 17 other states are not similarly exposed – or that outbreaks are attributable to “reduced vaccination rates”? There must be a host to infect the unvaccinated. Similarly, the CDC reported that “most of the recent importations involved unvaccinated Americans who got infected in the Middle East and Africa and brought measles back to the U.S.” How can the CDC accurately trace ghost migrants who avoid monitoring?

If not the cause of importation, there is no dispute that unvaccinated immigrants are a key demographic for spread: Per the CDC’s report, more than half of 2024’s cases come from the Chicago outbreak, largely from people living in migrant shelters. Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a doctor in NYC, told Fox News that the outbreaks in Chicago were predictable. “To be honest, I’m not surprised,” she said. “We have open borders with all sorts of people coming in from countries from all over the world bringing in various illnesses, viruses, disease and bacterial infections.”

Medical science confirms this logic. Open borders bypass overseas and US-entry screening, eliminate tracking, and make therapy and treatment difficult. Yet headlines proclaim that it is unvaccinated, misinformed Americans who are the threat. Such claims create a vicious cycle of yet more distrust of politicized government misinformation, increasing vaccination reticence.

New York City’s Tuberculosis

A recent tuberculosis outbreak in New York City appears to be similarly connected to illegals. In the Big Apple, the TB rate is 6.1 cases per 100,000 – more than double the national rate. According NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Commissioner Ashwin Vasan, “close to nine out of 10 (88%) of these TB cases are people born outside the United States.”

A 2019 study titled “The impact of migration on tuberculosis in the United States” concluded:

“Due to greater exposure to Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection before migration, migrants moving to low-incidence settings can experience substantially higher tuberculosis (TB) rates than the native-born population.

“….TB among non-US-born individuals now represents the majority of new TB cases. ….As TB disease can develop many years after infection, migrants exposed to high rates of tuberculous infection in their country of origin face elevated risks of future active disease after US arrival compared with US-born individuals ….with 53% of TB cases in non-US-born individuals coming from the top five countries (Mexico, the Philippines, India, Viet Nam and China), and 22% from Mexico alone.

“For the five countries of origin that represent the majority of non-US-born TB cases (Mexico, the Philippines, India, Viet Nam and China), their contributions to US TB epidemiology reflect large resident populations as well as elevated TB exposure for these individuals before arrival.”

Florida’s Leprosy Surge

The government’s disinformation campaign protecting illegals was repeated in Florida, where leprosy has been steadily rising and may be endemic, though experts do not know. Traditional risk factors include armadillo exposure and “having recently lived in leprosy-endemic countries.” Armadillos have been ruled out as a cause of Florida’s leprosy surge, yet the CDC issued a statement that seems to reach unsupportable conclusions:

“Florida, USA, has witnessed an increased incidence of leprosy cases lacking traditional risk factors. Those trends, in addition to decreasing diagnoses in foreign-born persons, contribute to rising evidence that leprosy has become endemic in the southeastern United States.

“The number of international migrants in North America increased from 27.6 million persons in 1990 to 58.7 million in 2020, so a link to migration may account for the increase in incidence of leprosy in historically nonendemic areas. Further, reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that, although the incidence of leprosy has been increasing, the rates of new diagnoses in persons born outside of the United States has been declining since 2002 (Appendix Figure).”

The CDC emphasized that “Contact tracing is critical to identifying sources and reducing transmission.” Illegals are not traced or effectively treated. The referenced appendix figure is titled “Case Report of Leprosy in Central Florida, USA, 2022,” but only includes data through 2010 – hardly a very good measure of current immigration conditions, let alone a sound premise for reaching conclusions that immigrants cannot be a cause of spread.

Politicizing disease outbreaks against Americans to justify yet more dangerous illegal immigration ensures greater vaccine hesitancy. One needn’t hold a doctorate to see that “real science” is being doctored.

(Previously published at Liberty Nation.)