Spartanburg County in South Carolina is home to a sizable Eastern European legal immigant community.
Several readers have responded to today’s Morning Jolt by insisting that the ongoing outbreak of measles in South Carolina must be the result of illegal immigrants who are not vaccinated against measles.
The South Carolina Department of Health has not released any information about the immigration status of those who have contracted the measles, just their ages and vaccination status:
Outbreak Data Points
Age breakdown of 111 cases:
Under 5: 20
5-17: 75
18+: 10
Minors under 18 (age undisclosed): 6Vaccination status:
105 unvaccinated, 3 partially vaccinated with one of the recommended two-dose MMR sequence, 1 vaccinated, 2 unknown.
However, Baker Maultsby of the Spartanburg Herald-Journal has written a detailed and useful profile of one of the communities affected.
For two days in early December, Denis Fedotov’s nine-year-old son had red spots on his face and a high fever.
Fedotov said his son’s illness wasn’t too rough.
“My kid had it, but he’s OK now,” he said.
The child’s fever spiked above 104 along the way – his mother treated that with medicine, Fedotov said. Otherwise, they kept him hydrated to help his system fight through the virus.
Fedotov said all four of his children are unvaccinated.
It isn’t that he opposes vaccines for religious or ideological reasons – he just doesn’t feel certain that they work all that well.
Fedotov spoke with the Herald-Journal outside the Way of Truth Church, where an exposure to the highly contagious virus led to 24 measles infections, according to DPH investigators. He’s not convinced that vaccination status was the determining factor in who caught measles and who did not.
. . . Major outbreaks in 2024 and 2025 have occurred in Mennonite communities in Texas and Canada. An Orthodox Jewish community in New York saw an outbreak in 2018 and 2019. A few years earlier, measles spread among the Amish population in Ohio.
That trend appears to hold true in Spartanburg County, where there are clear links to the county’s sizable Eastern European community.
Way of Truth Church is a Slavic language congregation with a large contingent of immigrants from Ukraine, said Fedotov, who was born in the neighboring country of Moldova and moved to the United States at the age of 13.
One of the first two schools to have measles cases early in the outbreak was Global Academy of South Carolina, a K-8 charter school that is popular among Ukrainian families.
As noted in today’s newsletter, just 17 percent of the students at the Global Academy of South Carolina have the state’s required immunization certification:
In 2022, Alexander Lorenz, a University of South Carolina Upstate professor and director of global engagement at the university, collaborated with one of his students, Nataliya Vykhovanets, on a paper about Ukrainians in South Carolina.
They reported that a wave of “religiously centered” Ukrainian immigrants began settling in the state in 1989. And many “belong to the Protestant Christian faith rather than the Orthodox faith.”
Data from the U.S. Census Bureau indicates that as of 2023, a bit more than 2,300 residents of the “Spartanburg County Landrum City public use microdata area” were born in Ukraine.
While it is possible that some fraction of the Ukrainian community in Spartanburg County entered the country illegally, there is no publicly available data indicating this. Note that under the Uniting for Ukraine refugee program in place from April 2022 to January 27, 2025, qualifying applicants “must have been resident in Ukraine as of February 11, 2022, have a supporter in the United States, complete vaccinations and other public health requirements, and pass biometric and biographic screening and vetting security checks.”