NPR · 32 days ago

As Measles Spreads, Parents Remain Divided on Vaccines. Why

When Kate Morrow moved to Spartanburg County with her medically fragile twins, she trusted her neighbors would vaccinate their children - but in this South Carolina community now facing the largest measles outbreak in decades, vaccination rates have plummeted to 89%, well below the threshold needed to protect the vulnerable. The reasons are tangled: lingering anger over COVID mandates, a pediatrician's patient who experienced a seizure after vaccination, a mother convinced vaccines caused her child's autism despite thorough debunking of that claim, and religious exemptions that have tripled since the pandemic. Yet something shifts when measles becomes real - Gene Zakharov vaccinated his children after his daughter was quarantined, and Tracy Hobbs finally brought her twins in for shots, saying, "The measles aren't really something to play with." What emerges is not a simple story of misinformation versus science, but something harder: neighbors living side by side with radically different understandings of trust, risk, and what it means to protect our children - until fear becomes concrete enough to touch.