— Minneapolis is home to the largest
Somali community in America,
and the area known as Little Mogadishu has
become ground zero for a major outbreak of measles.
The 78 cases reported in Minnesota so far
are more than what the entire
country experienced in all of 2016.
The vaccination rate for measles,
mumps and rubella, or MMR,
has plummeted among Somali-Americans
there over the last 10 years...
— Do listen to a doctor.
Don’t listen to anybody.
Listen to your rights.
— ...partly because anti-vaxxers have
been targeting the community
with messaging that falsely links
the MMR vaccine to autism.
— Wait! How tall are you?
— Abdinasir Fidow has seven kids.
His eldest son, Abdullahi,
was diagnosed with autism a couple
of years after he had the MMR shot.
Fidow didn’t vaccinate any of
his other children after that.
— So tell tell me about your son Abdullahi.
— Sure thing! Yeah, you can stop.
— No.
— Science says there is no link
between MMR and autism.
What would you say to some parents
who might not understand
where you’re coming from by not wanting
to vaccinate your other children?
— Would you consider vaccinating
your other children with MMR now,
because there’s this measles outbreak?
— Somali kids here are twice as likely as the rest
of the country’s to be diagnosed with autism,
and 100 percent of Somali kids with autism
in Minneapolis also have intellectual disabilities—
a stat three times higher than non-Somalis—
and public health officials still don’t know why.
That’s partly how antivaxxer messaging
has been so effective.
— The Somali community it’s very tight-knit here.
So fear and misconception can spread
really quickly because we’re so tight-knit,
we’re also very… an almost a closed community.
— Huda Ahmed knows that what counts as
“evidence” in her community is up for debate,
with science coming up against anecdote.
She’s a Somali-American mom of three
who works in the Department of Family Medicine
at the University of Minnesota.
— How old is your son?
— He’s 22 months.
— Has he already had all his vaccines?
— He’s had all of his vaccinations,
and he’s due when he’s 2 for his second dose of MMR.
When the Somali community sounded out the alarm,
trying to figure out why their kids were more
likely to develop autism than other kids,
the anti-vaccine community listened.
The public health community,
the scientific community, did not.
— One of the people who’s reached out
to the Somali community is Wayne Rohde,
a prominent vaccine skeptic in Minneapolis
who’s been speaking out about mandatory
vaccines like the MMR for over a decade:
— Now, the Minnesota Department of Health
and CDC’s saying there’s no connection.
Well, how many times do we need to
see kids having severe reactions?
And the autism in the Somali community is
not the moderate or the high-functioning.
We’re seeing kids that are just severely—no language.
Can you take this down to Nick?
— One of Wayne’s twins was diagnosed
with autism when he was a preschooler,
a diagnosis that Wayne attributes
to complications with the MMR.
But he says he doesn’t identify
with the label “anti-vaxxer.”
— It wasn’t until the last couple of years that
the Minnesota Department of Health decided,
“Okay, we’re gonna do outreach.”
Well, here’s what’s funny about that outreach,
is that most of the Somali community
refuses to accept them
because they felt that the people that got
hired by the Minnesota Department of Health
are just trying to infiltrate their group.
— Isn’t that what the groups
like yourself are doing, though,
infiltrating a community?
— We’re not infiltrating, we’re not doing anything.
All we’re doing is we’re answering questions
that the Somali parents are asking—
“What’s my legal rights?”
— What would you say to people who think
you’re irresponsible and endangering children?
— If people want to vaccinate, let them vaccinate.
I don’t have a problem with that.
That’s their decision.
— But part of the reason mandatory vaccines
are important is because of “herd immunity,”
basically safety in numbers.
The more people that are vaccinated,
the less likely it is for an infectious disease to spread,
even within a community where
some people can’t get an injection—
like pregnant women, young children,
or people who are immunocompromised.
It’s a message the Department of Health
is hoping to get across.
It’s hired Somali consultants like Asli Ashkir...
— ...to talk to local health care workers
at informal meetings like this one,
about how they can better reach out
to the Somali community.
— The Department of Health plans to
drastically increase their Somali outreach...
— ...but nothing has been as educational
for parents as this measles outbreak—
there’s been a 16-fold increase in MMR vaccinations
among Somali kids since the epidemic started.
