Successful public health campaigns and medical advances have enabled the United States to conquer a range of disfiguring and damaging diseases. Polio, which paralyzed thousands of Americans annually, was wiped out by widespread vaccinations. In 1999, the nation’s last hospital for lepers closed its doors in Louisiana. A global campaign eradicated smallpox, while lethal tuberculosis, the “consumption” that stalked characters in decades of literature, seemed beaten by antibiotics. Measles outbreaks still occur from time to time, but they are small, local, and easily contained.
Recently, however, some of these forgotten but still formidable infectious diseases have begun to reappear in the United States. For two years running, polio has been detected in some New York water samples, and this fall, leprosy reemerged in Florida, where cases of malaria have also been recorded.
Health officials say they are not sure why these and other infectious diseases are resurfacing. One distinct possibility, which officials are loath to discuss, is that the millions of illegal immigrants who have crossed into the country in recent years could be bringing the scourges with them, since many are from countries where such rare diseases persist and vaccination programs are not robust.
“The recent polio and leprosy cases are almost certainly imports to the U.S.,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and scientist at Stanford University, one of the most outspoken critics of official COVID-19 narratives in the last pandemic that later proved flawed.
And the Biden administration, an aggressive promoter of often mandatory vaccination last time, now is offering little public comment on the connection between disease and the porous borders with which its immigration policy has become widely identified.
“It’s not like there is some Typhoid Mary out there, but this is something people are seeing and thinking about, even if they don’t want to discuss it publicly,” said Art Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes the Biden administration’s border policies.
It is not clear if those migrants met the polio vaccination requirement. The DHS did not respond to a question about whether medical histories were reviewed in the fast-tracked entry of Afghans who got out of their country before the Taliban reimposed its control.
Dr. Vasan’s warning pointed directly to the southern border, which has seen record-shattering arrivals on the Biden administration’s watch.
“More than 50,000 people have come to New York City in the past year shortly after crossing the U.S.–Mexico border,” he wrote in an 11-page letter. “I am writing now to underscore how critical it is that health care providers take a wide range of considerations into account when working with people who are seeking asylum.”
Citing outbreaks of chickenpox in shelters for illegal immigrants, Dr. Vasan also noted the arrival of newcomers who either began their journey in a country where tuberculosis is present or passed through such countries en route to the United States.
The New York City Health Department did not respond to questions from RCI or to a request to speak with Dr. Vasan, but the numbers have only grown since he sent his letter. Since spring 2022, more than 100,000 illegal immigrants have arrived in the city, and more than 67,200 were living in taxpayer-funded housing at the end of November 2023, according to The New York Times.
‘Historically Atypical Countries’
The situation in the United States is further complicated by the fact that DHS officials don’t know where all of the more than 7.5 million illegal immigrants who’ve arrived since President Biden took office are living. Those whom Border Patrol agents have encountered and processed have immigration court dates, but those dates are years in advance. Many people with uncertain immigration status lack health insurance and stay off the grid as much as possible, meaning that even if the United States launched some kind of vaccination program, it would not know where to concentrate its efforts.Measles cases have risen in the United States to 121 in 2022 from 13 individual cases in 2020, according to the CDC. Recent outbreaks in Ohio and Illinois have all occurred among unvaccinated children, according to state health officials. The age and nationality of victims are not made public, but the measles vaccination rate is below 70 percent in many countries that have sent immigrants to the United States recently.
COVID-19 has drawn the lion’s share of attention from the public health bureaucracy since 2020, leading to shortfalls in other areas, some experts said.
“All of these diseases are more prevalent in part because of lockdown policies which diverted public health resources and attention worldwide away from its traditional priorities of controlling the spread of these deadly infectious conditions,” Dr. Bhattacharya said, referring to measles and other maladies.
And just as there is no cure for polio, there is no vaccine for some infectious diseases. Malaria, for example, the mosquito-borne fever that killed more workers than yellow fever did when the Panama Canal was built, remains endemic in tropical zones, and its path to rare outbreaks in the United States usually follows either a trip made abroad or someone moving here, according to health officials in Florida.
Florida Department of Health spokesman Jae Williams told RCI that the exact sources of many infectious disease outbreaks in the Sunshine State remain unknown but that the huge increase in illegal immigrants could be a clue.
“It’s always a possibility, and our most recent malaria cases appeared to be a strain from Central America,” he said.
In other words, the malaria could have been brought by a newcomer or picked up by someone who traveled there and returned.
But leprosy is not endemic in Florida. It is most common in parts of Southeast Asia, equatorial Africa, and Brazil.
“The influx of people, sure it’s a problem and it’s always a possibility,” Mr. Williams said. “But we don’t really know.”
Nevertheless, the questions are being asked with more frequency. On Dec. 19, 2023, Ashley St. Clair, a conservative commentator, set off a firestorm on X, formerly known as Twitter, that her Delta flight from Phoenix to New York was filled with people who had recently been processed, released, and brought to the airport by Border Patrol.
Delta did not respond to questions from RCI about what knowledge it had been provided about its passengers.