Red dots, Red Stick roots
Doctors with deep Baton Rouge roots helped fuel the vaccine retreat behind the nation's worst measles outbreak in 35 years.
Despite not one measles case turning up in East Baton Rouge Parish this year, Baton Rouge sits at the center of how this country is responding to the worst outbreak in 35 years. And not in a good way.
Why it matters: Doctors who live in Baton Rouge, or built their careers here, now sit at the epicenter of a national public health fight, including a doctor-turned-senator who helped set it all in motion by trading his vote for a shot at keeping his seat.
The senator's bet: Bill Cassidy grew up in Baton Rouge, trained at LSU and spent 25 years treating uninsured patients at Earl K. Long. He once ran a program that vaccinated 36,000 local kids against Hepatitis B, free.
- He cast the deciding vote to confirm the controversial Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, after securing promises Kennedy would leave vaccine policy alone.
- The vote was seen as a mea culpa to President Donald Trump and the MAGA world he had fallen out of favor with following his impeachment vote during Trump's first term.
- Those promises got broken. "The commitments that were made to me have been violated," Cassidy said this spring.
- He lost his Senate seat anyway, ousted in a primary months later.
The retreat: The same pullback from vaccine promotion driving the national measles surge started at the Louisiana Department of Health's downtown office, years before the first case hit Louisiana.
- Surgeon General Ralph Abraham ended the state's vaccine promotion hours after Kennedy's confirmation, weeks after two infants had already died of whooping cough. Cases climbed past 387 before the year was out.
- Abraham left Baton Rouge in December for a bigger job, sworn in as the CDC's second-in-command, then resigned abruptly 11 weeks later, citing family obligations.
- Baton Rouge OB/GYN Evelyn Griffin succeeded him as Louisiana's surgeon general, and now sits on the same federal vaccine panel Kennedy promised Cassidy he'd leave alone. Since joining, she's voted to end the newborn Hepatitis B recommendation.
The bottom line: More than 2,300 U.S. measles cases have been diangosed this year, the most in 35 years. The outbreak is still somebody else's headline. The policy behind it has Baton Rouge's fingerprints, and the casualty there was Cassidy's Senate career.
