GoKawiilFor years, anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his zealous followers have downplayed measles as “just a rash” and falsely claimed that “Measles outbreaks have been fabricated to create fear.”
In 2021, when Kennedy wrote those words, the US recorded just 49 measles cases. Yearly case counts have generally been low since 2000, when the US declared measles eliminated thanks to a decades-long vaccination campaign. But with the rise of Kennedy and his ilk in the past few decades, that public health triumph is being undone. Vaccination rates have slipped, and large, multistate outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases have inevitably come roaring back. Now it’s becoming painfully clear once again how wrong Kennedy and his cohorts are about infectious diseases and vaccines.
In a study published yesterday in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, state and federal researchers provided a detailed postmortem of last year’s massive multi-state measles outbreak that mushroomed out of West Texas. The data reveals a disease that’s far from just a rash, with about 20 percent of people—mostly younger children—being hospitalized.
“The outcomes experienced by patients hospitalized during this outbreak underscore the seriousness of measles infection and highlight that measles can cause life-threatening complications affecting multiple organ systems and place significant stress on patients and health care systems,” the authors conclude.
By the end of the outbreak, there were 762 outbreak-related measles cases in Texas alone. The new analysis focused on 325 cases in the outbreak’s first three months (January 20 to March 18, 2025). Of those, at least 60 were hospitalized (18.5 percent). The researchers collected medical and case information from 54 of the hospitalized patients. All of them had no record of being vaccinated.
Thirty of the 54 (56 percent) were young children between the ages of newborn and 4 years old. Nineteen (35 percent) were children ages 5 to 17. The five remaining cases were in adults, four of whom were pregnant women in their third trimester.