“I think there’s a sense of anxiety and even a little panic in the public health community” as officials see high levels of mistrust of government and science from a surprising number of people, said Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University public health law expert.
That anxiety has led to what Gostin believes are missteps by officials.
It’s one thing to isolate someone with measles or to quarantine someone who has been exposed, he said. Those people are infection risks, and short-term limitations of where they can go and who they can meet are legally and medically appropriate, Gostin said.
But it’s another thing to take the kind of step Rockland County initially did, in which unvaccinated kids were placed under house arrest — not because they were infection risks, but because their parents weren’t listening to public health officials, he said.
“That’s overly punitive,” he said.
Indeed, a judge struck down the initial emergency order.
One community had success without taking such measures. Officials in Vancouver, Washington, declared an end Monday to a measles outbreak that began in January but apparently stopped at 71 cases a month ago. It was a much smaller community than New York City or Los Angeles and was tamed by an intense investigation and vaccination campaign that involved 230 health workers tracking down infected people and those they had contact with, at a cost of about $865,000.