""You plant her on the couch with a blanket and put Bluey on the TV while she drifts in and out of sleep,""
""While the kids are napping, you tap a list of your daughter's symptoms into Google and find a slew of diseases that more or less match up""
""Her cough wracks her whole body, rounding her delicate bird shoulders. She does not sleep well. And as you lift up her pajama top to check her rash one morning, you see that her breathing is labored, shadows pooling between her ribs when she sucks in air.""
A second-person account follows a parent caring for unvaccinated children who contract measles, moving from everyday caregiving to escalating respiratory distress. The narrative details familiar domestic scenes, symptom Googling, and the progression from rash and cough to labored breathing and long-term neurological harm for an infant. Measles, declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, experienced a major resurgence by 2025, with multiple outbreaks continuing into 2026. The account draws on extensive reporting and physician interviews, and reader reactions included shock and debate over the choice to present an imagined household scenario grounded in factual research.
Read at Nieman Lab
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