This year marks 25 years since the measles was eradicated in the United States due to the success of the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine. It also marks the first measles-related death in over a decade.
Last week, an unvaccinated school-aged child died from measles in West Texas. The case was part of a greater measles outbreak in the region, which has infected over 100 people across multiple states and is continuing to grow. The death of this child, as well as inevitable future deaths if this outbreak continues at its current rate, can be completely preventable.
The MMR vaccine is about 97% effective at preventing measles, and there is clear scientific consensus that the vaccine is safe and effective. While the scientific community has not wavered, public consensus has. MMR vaccination rates have declined in nearly every state since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and this trend does not seem to be going away.
While MMR vaccination rates have declined across the board, the greatest declines have been seen in states that Donald Trump won in the 2024 election. The share of kindergarten students with vaccine exemptions in these states is double that of states won by Kamala Harris. This trend, as well as the unwavering support of the vaccine from the scientific community, suggests that the root of the problem has nothing to do with the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine. Instead, the declining vaccination rates and explosive measles outbreak are a product of political misinformation.
Vaccine misinformation is not a new concept. The reason for most hesitancy around the MMR vaccine specifically is that people believe the vaccine is linked to the development of autism. This belief began because of a now retracted scientific journal article published in 1998 by a British physician named Andrew Wakefield. Every article since has disproved these claims, and it was found that Wakefield deliberately falsified this data to make money off of a competing vaccine.
Unfortunately, the falsehoods promoted by Wakefield did not die with the withdrawal of his paper or the termination of his license. These fabricated ideas have proliferated, amplified by public fear during the COVID-19 pandemic, and now are being reiterated by the recently appointed head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former heroin addict who is not a doctor, and has most likely never read Wakefield’s article or any published scientific journal article for that matter.
Kennedy’s views on vaccines have already had catastrophic consequences in the United States and around the world. In 2019 when Kennedy was the chairman of an anti-vaccine nonprofit called Children’s Health and Defense, he visited the small island nation of Samoa during a crisis in which infants were prevented from receiving the MMR vaccine because a human error in the creation of the vaccine caused two deaths. During his visit, Kennedy spread his misinformed views on vaccines to the Samoan government, encouraging them to try unproven alternative cures. Just a couple of months later, a measles outbreak spread through the country, killing 83 people, most of whom were young children. To this day, Kennedy refuses to acknowledge that the outbreak was caused by a lack of vaccination and denies having any role in it.
In 2020, Kennedy shifted his focus to spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers identified that Kennedy was one of 12 people responsible for spreading the majority of misleading or completely untrue claims about COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy falsely claimed that the vaccine was “the deadliest vaccine ever made” and that baseball player Hank Aaron’s death in 2021 was “part of a wave of suspicious deaths” due to the vaccine. These baseless claims, along with similar claims from Kennedy’s anti-vaxx peers, proliferated across social media platforms into people’s algorithms, contributing to the rise in vaccine hesitancy and a drop in vaccination rates.
The 2025 measles outbreak and the first U.S. measles death in a decade are the manifestation of these false claims. The American people will continue to suffer the consequences of vaccine misinformation, especially now that a man making these claims is at the forefront of our public health system. We need to put medical professionals at the head of messaging on the issue of vaccines, portraying that the medical community is a united front on this issue. We need to spread the message that the current measles outbreak and the death of the young child was entirely preventable, and that vaccination is essential to preventing future outbreaks.