The 2025 measles outbreak is largest in three decades
'People should be getting healthier. We've got more solutions. Medicine is advancing, and yet you're seeing people turning away from it,' said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an expert on infectious disease and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. 'To me, this is the mentality of the Dark Ages.'
The outbreak is primarily centered in Texas, where at least 750 cases have been reported . It's also spread to nearby communities in New Mexico and Kansas. The vast majority of cases have been in unvaccinated people, and the outbreak began in a religious community with a long history of vaccine skepticism.
Three people in connection with the Texas outbreak this year — including 2 children — according to the CDC, and 162 people have been hospitalized. Both children were 'school-age,' according to the Texas Department of Health, and unvaccinated.
Most U.S. states have seen at least one case of measles in 2025.
Yearly measles cases dropped sharply in the 1990s after the CDC's panel of vaccine experts decided to add a second dose of the MMR vaccine to the childhood vaccine schedule. The disease was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000 because of widespread immunity through vaccinations, but public health experts have said that, this year, the U.S. is at risk of losing that designation .
— Key context: The 2019 outbreak — like the 2025 Texas outbreak — was tied to close-knit religious communities with a history of vaccine skepticism. But national coverage for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine has fallen steadily in kindergarteners since the the Covid-19 pandemic — a trend public health experts and officials have said is likely tied to increased vaccine skepticism.
The latest CDC data, for the 2022-2023 school year, found a two percent drop in the vaccination rate among kindergarteners compared to before the pandemic .
Kennedy has shifted on his messaging around the outbreak, sometimes saying that vaccination is the best way to prevent the disease, but at other times inaccurately claiming the shot contains 'aborted fetus debris.'
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