This case was misrepresented in the 2019 Senate H.E.L.P vaccination hearing as being a child and linked to school vaccine requirement nonmedical exemptions. 1:44:10 help.senate.gov/hearing…

But- not a student, not exposed in a school but a medical facility, i.e. a “nosocomial” infection (hospital acquired) , no post-exposure immunoglobulin offered making this potentially a iatrogenic failure, (potentially not offered due to her vaccination status), no symptoms, all during an outbreak that started in a mid-50’s year old man. That 2019 hearing is remembered as the coming out party for Ethan Lindenberger, ted.com/speakers/ethan_…, a young man very publicly defying his anti-vax upbringing. The committee extolled US parents not to listen to contrarian medical experts, but to defer to this teenager.

I prepared a mark up of the story below and provided it to the committee members, and to the aide to my Senator patty Murray, who was quite surprised to learn the facts. sequimgazette.com/news/…

Senator Cassidy, “Now, Dr. Wiesman, I seem to remember a particularly tragic case in Washington State from about six years ago of a child who was immunocompromised on steroids chemotherapy for cancer, and someone brought measles to the school and I think I remember that child died. Do I remember that correctly? Dr. WIESMAN. If we are talking about the same child, yes, he dies a number of years later from a follow-up reaction. Senator CASSIDY. Now, so the parent has had the child vaccinated, but now she is on cancer chemotherapy and she is immunocompromised, and she is in school thinking that she can be a normal child, even though she is on cancer chemotherapy, but because someone else has made a decision not to vaccinate their child, her child dies. Now, do you believe in liberty? That is fine. Do not get immunized, but I do not think you need to necessarily expose others to disease.” P47 govinfo.gov/content/pkg…

This was not the only fallacy in the hearing. They used the NIS 314×413 rate for how many toddlers have 16 or 16 injections by age 35 months, which is 65%, but by each vaccine series exceeds 90%. Also reported in the written briefing was the improper citing of Clark County, WA’s MMR K-12 coverage rate. The CC exemption all type exemption rate was only 5.3%. The school reports documented MMR coverage at over 93%. Instead, for the first time the County and State health departments did not use the official, legally mandated school reports but instead cited an online widget reporting system widget “estimate”, with a shrunken numerator, (didn’t include all students or all injection administered) and bloated 150% “population estimate” denominator, resulting in an only 78% MMR rate. This was done to exaggerate a measles “inbreak” occurring in an insular, ethnic-religious group, all to support removal of legislation to remove the philosophical exemption to the MMR. The kicker- these families used the religious exemption.