— 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.