Pittsburgh’s Measles Risk, Explained

This is CityCast Pittsburgh.

I'm Megan Harris, and here's what Pittsburgh's talking about.

Measles cases are on the rise.

Here in Pennsylvania, we just clocked our 200th case, more than 45 of those just in the last week.

It's especially scary since kids are headed back to school soon, and school vaccination rates have been dropping for years.

To talk about how we got here and what maybe we can do about it, we're bringing back a conversation with The Post-Gazette's Mike Wearshagen about he and his colleagues' big investigation into measles rates.

vaccinations and why no one is enforcing existing rules around them.

That reporting, by the way, helped pressure the state to launch a new tool where anyone can track school vaccination rates from the comfort of your home.

Something, as you will hear, that Mike and his team had to do first all on their own.

There's no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.

That is our health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a few months before he joined the Trump administration.

And sentiments like his are at least a contributing factor to what we are talking about today.

I'm with Mike Wearshagen, a reporter and editor with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's investigations team.

Y'all recently dropped a really big piece on vaccination rates, how low they are at our local schools and what that means for kids and their families and by extension, what it means for the rest of us.

Walk us through what you found.