Worst Measles Outbreak Since Before the Elimination of the Disease in 2000

https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/05/health/measles-cases-us-record-since-elimination

(Click link above for source article).

Measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, the year that I started medical school. I remember sitting in my first year Microbiology class, being taught by an Infectious Disease physician, and how he spoke with a kind of pride at what we had accomplished as a science-focused public health apparatus in the United States. It took roughly 30 years of high vaccination rates to achieve a year without sustained transmission. In a sense, we had won much like how we had against smallpox.

But what is happening now shows that when we neglect best practices, public health measures such as vaccination, that we risk bringing back diseases that were an afterthought in most of our lives. Unfortunately our public health apparatus is now very focused on eliminating the measures that allowed us to achieve low transmission rates for diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, tetanus, diphtheria, and many others. This dangerous focus of the “health leadership” in this country combined with intense and never ending propaganda will likely usher in an era of sickness like we have never experienced in our lives. We risk a public health environment that will feel more like 1925 than 2025.

The only thing we can do at this point is continue to speak truth and fight propaganda until political leadership can be changed. Unfortunately a huge amount of damage has been done and I estimate it will take 40-50 Years to undo it. For now most of us have good protection against most diseases but the tide will turn when today’s unvaccinated toddlers and all the children that will be born to anti-vax families start to populate our communities. What is happening in west Texas right now will be happening all across the United States. I wish I had good news or a great plan, but the worst thing we could’ve possibly done was elect anyone that would put RFK jr anywhere near health policy. And we did it anyway despite many of us in the medical community sounding the alarms.

DLW