By Vince Phillips
Last Tuesday in the Chaffee County Commissioner’s meeting, Public Health Director Andrea Carlstrom laid it out plain. She said Chaffee County cannot quite shake measles and warned we might be heading into a new public health era: life with measles. She pointed out that the average cost to investigate and respond to just one case runs a staggering $76,000, money coming straight out of local budgets and taxpayer pockets right here in Chaffee County. Carlstrom and other health officials keep hammering the same message: the problem is vaccine hesitancy and low MMR vaccination rates. In her recent column for National Public Health Week she talked about rapid response to emerging threats such as measles, a disease that was once declared eliminated in the United States.
If it was once eliminated here, the obvious question is: where is it coming from now? The clear answer is importation through international travel and migration from countries with lower vaccination rates. The CDC has documented repeated importations, and recent years have seen thousands of cases, with many linked to unvaccinated or under-vaccinated individuals entering the country.
If preventing pandemics and protecting public health were truly the highest priority, then allowing large numbers of unvaccinated individuals to make free incursions across our southern border and be distributed across the country would not be permitted. Yet that is exactly what federal policy allowed for years. While legal immigrants must show proof of MMR vaccination before entry or adjustment of status, the vast majority of those crossing the border illegally or claiming asylum face no such requirement. They are frequently released into the interior and relocated nationwide, sometimes on the taxpayer dime, without being vaccinated.
If it is so important for American citizens to be vaccinated, why is it not equally important for those entering our country?
While local health departments scramble to contain outbreaks and blame hesitancy, federal policies have spent years facilitating the entry and wide distribution of people from regions where measles vaccination coverage is far lower. HHS has poured billions into migrant support programs that include medical care and relocation across the country, including to states like Colorado.
In Colorado and in Chaffee County, sanctuary-style policies limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Commissioner P.T. Wood has been vocal in this area, stating that the states are seeing increasing activity by ICE, invading, attacking citizens, acting well outside the law, and that county officials are actively looking at how we can react to those illegal incursions. So, what is the priority here, stopping ICE or preventing disease transmission?
Add in the government’s track record on COVID vaccines, where officials made sweeping claims about safety and efficacy that later proved overstated or incomplete, and it is no wonder many Americans are now hesitant to blindly follow the next public health mandate. When the same government that pushed those policies refuses to own past failures, trust erodes fast.
This is classic government working against itself. One set of federal policies dramatically raises the risk of importing preventable diseases. Another set of agencies and local health departments then spends millions on outbreak response, contact tracing, and public campaigns that never mention the upstream cause. Taxpayers foot the bill for both sides of the problem.
Perhaps Chaffee County Government would care to weigh in. What is more important, public health or unfettered immigration? Are your actions causing Chaffee County citizens to endure increased health risks?
This is exactly the pattern we are exposing in the Funding Both Sides series. Part 0 showed it on the international stage with Syria. Part 1 brings it home to Chaffee County and Colorado. Stay tuned. Part 2 is coming, and it keeps peeling back the layers on how our own government uses our money to fight itself, and us.
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