Health officials in Texas say the measles outbreak could take a year to contain. Stat has the details. A father in mourning spoke to The Atlantic about what it was like to lose a child to the disease. Reuters’ Dawn Chmielewski explains the unusual role the White House is playing in the sale of TikTok. Justin Williams and Sabreena Merchant with The Athletic share what they’ll be watching for during March Madness. Plus, a jury ordered Greenpeace to pay more than $660 million in damages connected to protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Federal Reserve keeps interest rates steady, and why a government webpage about Jackie Robinson was scrubbed, then restored. Today’s episode was hosted by Shumita Basu.
Chapter 1: What are the details of the measles outbreak in Texas?
But first, to the measles outbreak that has now infected more than 300 people across West Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma. Authorities in Texas are now saying the outbreak could take up to a year to contain. The outbreak is centered in Gaines County on the border of Texas and New Mexico. Texas health officials said Tuesday 279 cases have been identified since late January.
Chapter 2: Who was the first measles death in a decade in the U.S.?
and 36 people have been hospitalized. There has been one death in Texas, a six-year-old child, the first measles death in the country in a decade. Tom Bartlett is a freelance reporter and recently traveled to the town of Seminole in Gaines County to write about this for The Atlantic.
It is way out in the desert. You pass through long stretches between towns where there isn't much other than, you know, oil pump jacks. And it's a small town. It's about 7,000 people in Seminole.
There's a big Mennonite community there. The six-year-old who died was part of that community. Bartlett asked locals in the town if they knew the family who had lost their child. And after driving around a bit, he was pointed to a nondescript building that was a Mennonite church. That's where he met a man named Peter.
He's a construction worker. He's 28 years old. He had five children, one of whom got measles and very tragically passed away.
Chapter 3: How is the local community reacting to the measles outbreak?
Bartlett says Peter's daughter had been sick for three weeks, and she was treated by doctors about an hour away at the closest hospital that could take serious cases.
And according to Peter, they were sent home with cough medicine and told that she should recover at home. They later returned to the hospital. And according to Peter, her condition just worsened. She was eventually put on a ventilator and passed away.
Peter's daughter was unvaccinated against measles. And Bartlett reports Peter himself also expressed doubts about the MMR vaccine, saying he considers getting measles a normal part of life and that he heard measles strengthens your immune system, which is not true. In fact, according to studies from the Harvard T.H.
Chan School of Public Health, measles not only weakens the immune system, it can even result in a complication called immune amnesia, where the body forgets how to protect itself against infections for several years, leaving children extremely vulnerable. Bartlett told us Peter knew why his town was in the news.
He heard President Trump had been asked about the outbreak there, but Peter said he thought his community was being unfairly singled out.
What he said and what others said is they felt as if we're not the only community that gets measles. Others have gotten it. There have been other outbreaks. And I think it's good to note that there's nothing specifically in the Mennonite religion that forbids vaccination or modern medical care.
And yet vaccination rates are low in this community. The official numbers in Gaines County show just 82 percent of kindergartners have had the MMR vaccine, well below the 95 percent threshold required to maintain herd immunity.
And most likely that number is inaccurate anyway, because many kids in the Mennonite community there are homeschooled or in private schools that aren't required to collect data on vaccines. Bartlett said people there are also acutely aware of how political the conversation has become.
I had some people express to me that this was because this is now sort of caught up in a political context because our current Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert Kennedy, has in the past been extremely skeptical of vaccines, including the MMR vaccine. And so I think some of them saw this as bound up in a political discussion that doesn't really have anything to do with us.
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Chapter 4: What is the role of the White House in the TikTok sale?
Let's check in on a story we haven't talked about for a minute, TikTok and who's going to own it. You might recall that last year, President Biden signed legislation requiring the Chinese owner of the app, ByteDance, to sell it to a non-Chinese buyer or face a ban in the United States. Earlier this year, President Trump pushed back the deadline for that ban until April 5th.
In recent days, Vice President Vance told NBC News that he thinks a deal could be in place by that deadline. And Vance has now taken on a direct role in that deal. Don Chmielewski is a U.S. correspondent for Reuters.
J.D. Vance has been placed in the role of effectively investment banker to sort of entertain offers for U.S. buyers to take over this asset. And he and his staff have been providing direction to bidders, you know, making suggestions about how to adjust the offer. So this is an incredibly unusual role, though, for the White House to play.
While unusual, it's not entirely unprecedented for the White House to get involved in the dealings of publicly traded companies. Chmielewski cited some other examples.
The government intervened in Nippon Steel's attempts to take over U.S. Steel is an intervention to protect a crucial U.S. asset. So that's the role the government can typically take. It also typically intervenes when there's a monopoly and the government needs to play a role to ensure that consumers are protected against predatory practices. Brokering and sale of an app is apart from that.
The White House and members of Vance's team did not respond to Reuters' request for comment, and neither did TikTok. As for Trump's role in all of this, Trump is the one who kicked off the initial bid to ban TikTok during his first term back in 2020, but he has since reversed his position.
And more recently, he said he has a warm spot for the app because, as he put it, it helped him win more younger voters in the most recent election. He also has said that the U.S. could take a sizable stake in the company.
You take 50% of TikTok for the approval that TikTok can continue in business. And they'd have a great partner. The U.S. would be their partner. But the U.S. essentially would be paid for doing that half of the value of TikTok.
There are many people reportedly in the mix to make an offer for TikTok. One group of interested investors includes Frank McCourt, a former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and Canadian investor Kevin O'Leary. Jimmy Donaldson, the social media star who goes by MrBeast, is also in talks to potentially join that group.
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