U.S. Measles Cases Eclipse 2025’s Record Case Count
from the needlessly-stupid dept
The American healthcare system and the portion of the government in charge of our health have been a failure of record proportions for the second consecutive year. In 2025, America set a record for collecting the most confirmed cases of measles since 1991, with 2,289 confirmed cases. This year, America already blew past last years case total, where we now sit at 2,318 confirmed cases. We’re only about 58% of the way through the year, in case that little fact escaped you, which means we’re very likely to have many, many more total cases this year than last.
That is happening despite healthcare professionals and some media members sounding the alarm bells over all of this going all the way back to February of 2025! If you need the government’s perspective on this embarrassing failure, one in which we’ve allowed a disease officially declared eradicated to roar back into existence all because there are some liars out there who scare people about vaccines, well, RFK Jr. thinks he’s doing a bang up job managing the whole thing.
He hasn’t. He’s a large part of the reason this now 19 month outbreak exists to begin with. He hasn’t mobilized any vaccination efforts, preferring to leave that to the states. His messaging around vaccination and how to handle the measles has been so all over the place that he might as well have no stance on the matter at all. He’s checked out from most of his job, by some reports.
And as all of this failure is staring us in the face, Kennedy is still allowing the anti-vaxxer messaging to spread undisputed and uninterrupted, which is the precise reason the measles has returned in the first place. And it’s very likely to get worse.
“There were two healthy little girls in West Texas that died from measles,” said Dr. Paul Offit, Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in an email to TIME. “Those were the first measles deaths in a child in this country in more than 20 years. I think it is fair to say that measles is epidemic in the United States. And if people are coming from outside this country to the United States, they better make sure they’re up-to-date on their immunizations.”
Adds Dr. Peter Hotez, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine: “For all practical purposes measles has returned to the United States, both in terms of cases and hospitalizations, as well as two needless deaths. We should expect our annual winter-spring surges of measles to get even worse in subsequent years. And it won’t be just measles—pertussis is also returning, and other childhood infectious diseases might follow.”
Measles has this fun little curve ball it likes to throw at its victims: immune amnesia. One of the more insidious things this virus does is destroy T-cells and B-cells, which are the long-term immunological memory cells. They’re the part of our bodies that recall infections from long ago and build in the longer lasting immunity we get either from infections themselves or from vaccinations. Allowing measles to get worse means not only dealing with that disease, but potentially many others that could come roaring back. Like pertussis. Or polio.
We haven’t developed therapies for measles in decades. We didn’t have to. Vaccination rates meant there was nearly no disease for which therapies were needed. That appears to be changing now, with reports that researchers are starting to develop drug therapies due to the record case counts.
That is valuable time, expertise, and money that is being spent to treat a disease that we were fucking rid of two decades ago. Thanks to liars and charlatans like RFK Jr., combined with a percentage of our populace that is uncaring of its own community.
I very much do not look forward to writing about breaking this record again in 2027, but I fear I will be.
Filed Under: anti-vaxxers, epidemic, health & human services, measles, rfk jr., vaccinations
Comments on “U.S. Measles Cases Eclipse 2025’s Record Case Count”
Hey, at least we may get a Democrat in 2028.
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It’s the illegal aliens.
None of them were ever required or even asked illegals to be vaccinated. The cases are strongly clustered along the border, even! (not that illegals stay there).
It’s the illegal aliens you stupid fuck.
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That is a lie and you know it.
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It’s true and kinda obvious, actually.
You don’t get to just call facts you don’t like “a lie” and pretend that means something.
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Then where’s your proof?
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That’s your MO, you do it all the time. You are so fucking stupid that you can’t even understand that people think you are fucking stupid.
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You don’t get to just call facts you don’t like “a lie” and pretend that means something.
One day, you too might have some miniscule sense of self-awareness.
Dumbass.
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Of course it’s a lie, he has to lie because he can’t hack factual reality.
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“There is no evidence to show that migrants are spreading disease,” Dr. Paul Spiegel, who directs the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health told journalist Maggie Fox of NBC News. “That is a false argument that is used to keep migrants out.”
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You know Republicans don’t listen to experts unless they’re saying what Republicans want to hear.
Before you criticize RFK Jr., remember that it can always get worse.
Well...
What else do you expect to happen after electing Chaos to government – with disciples of Nurgle running the Health department? 😛 🙁
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Hey, at least Nurgle makes good on his promises.
Wrong scapegoat
RFK Jr. is an idiot, but idiots are a dime a dozen. This one even has well-documented brain damage.
Congress has the power to confirm cabinet members, and Congress has the power to impeach them. This would be a no-brainer, but the Antichrist has controlling majorities in Congress and smiles upon the work of RFK Jr. It normalizes and distracts from his own scandals and actual malice.
United in corruption, zealotry and now plague.
I honestly didn’t think I’d live to see the US imploding like that.
And I’ve read these days that King Donald is going to try a 3rd term. It’s illegal you’d say. Well, there’s plenty of illegal going on in the US with the blessings of a corrupt SCOTUS and compromised congress/senate. So yeah.
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Echo
Echo. Echo . . . echo . . . echo.
I love coming here to see how the other side lives. I see it now. Freedom for me but not for thee.
Re: See, here is your mistake:
Jefferson wrote “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots…”.
But he did not mean that killing patriots is the way to liberty. That is the modern Republican interpretation.
Re: Why bring up freedom on this article, out of all of them?
Which “side” are you on? The freedom of parents to abuse their children by leaving them vulnerable to measles?
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Glad to see the ignorati breaks his silence to let us know that measles are a-ok! How dare anyone complain about preventable diseases spreading and compromising the health of our neighbors?!? I have a right to knowingly infect other people! Who says I can’t drink and drive? Nuclear reactor in my basement! FREEEDOM!!!
If you don’t want to experience responsibility, you can just leave society. And you won’t hear anyone complain, both because you’ll be out of earshot and everyone will being cheering.
My only silver lining
I was able to finally get my youngest and last vaccinated two months ago, so I no longer have the personal anxiety over measles, but the fact that millions of babies are at risk because of this sucks and is ridiculous in 2026.
Sometimes you get what you deserve
MAHA? More like MADA (Make America Dead Again). Do we need to start a pool on when polio and diphtheria and and typhoid and cholera and other fun old-time stuff are back in vogue?
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Hey, with the current state of the FDA we might even be getting back botulism and other food-borne problems. I mean, we already have a cyclosporiasis epidemic rolling right now.
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Do we need to start a pool on when polio and diphtheria and and typhoid and cholera and other fun old-time stuff are back in vogue?
When the demand for horse dewormer or aquarium cleaner suddenly increases, you’ll know the ‘good ol’ days’ are just around the corner.
Except we were not rid of it, which is why it was important to keep vaccinating. Whereas we don’t routinely vaccinate against smallpox anymore.
(Smallpox does still exist in a U.S. lab—which means that, technically, R.F.K. could fuck that up, too. Or it could re-evolve or be re-created from still-extant viruses, so the U.S. is or was still vaccinating against it, in very limited populations.)
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Completely? No. But functionally? Pretty much. Vaccinations being at the level they were when measles was declared “eradicated” in the US led to measles infections being so rare on a year-to-year basis that the rarity of cases in the US was a norm instead of an exception. That changed thanks to conservatives being so absurdly anti-science, anti-expert, and pro-individualism that anti-vax rhetoric is now the norm on the right. Welcome to the right-wing dream—which, for everyone else, is a fucking nightmare.
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I don’t know what exactly you mean by “functionally” or whether that would be a reasonable standard. But in terms of public messaging—especially now—I consider it quite important to not overstate our public health victories.
We should not be using words like “eradicated” till it’s as dead as smallpox and we can stop vaccinating. After all, it makes no obvious sense to vaccinate for something that’s been eradicated. Nor is an “in the U.S.” qualifier useful to the general public, while people (and other animals) are crossing the border constantly.
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What it means is that measles cases are…okay, sorry, were so rare in the U.S. due to vaccinations that the disease couldn’t cause breakouts like what we’ve seen in the past couple of years. People could still catch it, but their ability to spread the disease was limited. As a matter of the function of public health, measles was considered “eradicated” in the United States even if it wasn’t completely eradicated around the entire world.
We can quibble over the language and all, but that won’t do us any good in solving the real issue: anti-vax attitudes causing a resurgence in measles cases.
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I’m sure you understand the reality of the measles situation, and I’m not pointing this out to quibble with you. But the average American is, let’s say, not as scientifically literate as I might like, nor are they very good with nuanced language. So I think we really should treat it as important to be clear when writing for a general audience.
Imagine your least-favorite Trump-linked asshole going on television and saying “but Dr. Stone told us measles was eradicated!”. They’d show proof, and then spin any attempt to clarify that as some sort of further dishonesty. This has happened before; it’ll happen again.
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Okay, then. Let’s be clear.
Since 2000, the United States has enjoyed the privilege of having measles declared “eliminated” within the United States. This means that, according to guidelines set by the Pan American Health Organization (of which the U.S. is a member), measles had not seen large outbreaks or uncontrolled domestic transmission within the U.S. for a period of at least 12 months. This is almost entirely due to the measles vaccine. It has a decades-long track record of safety and effectiveness, and the herd immunity effect helps protect those who can’t get the vaccine.
In the past two years, the number of vaccinations have reduced while the number of outbreaks has increased, jeopardizing that “eliminated” status. We don’t need to guess why that happened: Anti-vax rhetoric, which exploded in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, helped spread distrust of public health systems—including vaccinations. That is the end result of a right-wing distrust of expertise, science, and knowledge in general that has been building up for decades.
Whether measles is actually eradicated is largely beside the point. The actual point is that anti-vax rhetoric is responsible for potentially bringing measles back in a way that hasn’t been seen since the late 20th Century. Finding a “better way” of talking about the eradication status of measles in the U.S. isn’t going to make anti-vax bullshit go away.
Have I made myself clear?
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Your position was already clear, and seems to match reality. But you described an environment of “distrust of expertise, science, and knowledge in general”, and for some reason thought it would help to write 3 paragraphs relating to experts, facts, and numbers. I feel like we’re not entirely on the same page.
Nothing’s gonna make it “go away”—there are apparently still people who seriously believe the earth to be flat—but I think clear (and succinct) communication can usefully help push back against ignorance. Whereas using a word like “eliminated” or “eradicated”, with a non-literal definition in a footnote, is likely to cause further distrust of the people saying it.
It’s not like it’d be hard to describe the eradication status (circa 2024) as “really, really close, so please don’t fuck this up” or “achievable with continued vaccination”.