A school-age child with measles died in Texas this week, making it the first measles death in the U.S. in 10 years. This child was one of dozens of unvaccinated kids infected with measles in a multi-county, two-state outbreak of an illness the U.S. had officially eliminated 25 years ago.
As Texas and New Mexico public health officials respond dutifully with vaccine clinics, contact tracing and exposure alerts, people are still getting sick from this vaccine-preventable disease. Measles is one of the most contagious illnesses on the planet, so it will be a while before this outbreak ends. More people will get sick. Hopefully no one else will die.
Yet during a press briefing that same day, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., secretary of health and human services, downplayed the scope of this outbreak. “It’s not unusual,” he said, noting other measles outbreaks this year and last, and saying that most of the hospitalized children are there to be quarantined, implying they weren’t that sick, just being isolated to prevent the spread of the disease.
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This is untrue. The outbreaks this year are unusual. For one, this is the third outbreak in 2025, and we are just two months in. Second, at least 133 cases have been confirmed in the current Texas/New Mexico outbreak, which is nearly half the number of infections in the 16 outbreaks reported in the U.S. last year, which totaled 285 cases. RFK, Jr., was also wrong about the “quarantined” children: they have been hospitalized because they are having trouble breathing, not just to keep them isolated.
We shouldn’t be fighting diseases we once eliminated. We shouldn’t be burying children who could live long and fulfilling lives, and we shouldn’t be watching as others suffer. For all the doubt that antivaccine advocates, including RFK, Jr., have sowed around childhood immunizations, for all the political proclamations of conscientious objection and the freedom to choose, this child did not have a choice. Neither did any of the others who are sick. When it comes to public health, our choices do not stop with us. And our leaders simply do not recognize that.
Of course there are medical reasons why some children cannot get vaccines. This isn’t about them. This is about the million reasons why we, as a nation, have decided that our collective health is less important than our individual desires. We saw this play out during COVID, which ended up claiming more than one million lives at the peak of the pandemic between 2020 and 2022. People don’t trust government. They don’t trust doctors. They don’t trust scientists. They don’t trust vaccines. Instead many of us trust the people who tell us what we want to hear. We trust the evidence we like and discard the rest. We don’t want to be told what to do.
But in believing what you want to believe, in believing the people who challenge, without basis, the evidence we have that working collectively improves everyone’s health, we fall right into the trap of what misinformation is trying to do: distract us so we don’t see what’s happening right under our noses.
And the measles vaccine is the perfect example.
For decades, people worldwide have been inoculated with a live, attenuated virus. This is a strain of the measles virus, cut off at the knees. It teaches our immune system to recognize and attack the real, wild virus, without getting us sick. But a few of us do. A few people get vaccinated and then get a rash, a fever, essentially a less intense case of the measles. (And a few people, even with the two-dose vaccine regimen, get sick anyway.) And this is what you see on social media as people blame the vaccine itself for causing measles. Never mind how that poor child would have suffered had they gotten an actual full-on infection, one that could cause brain swelling, trouble breathing or actual death.
Or, as RFK, Jr., did in Samoa, look at the scant evidence around two measles-vaccine related deaths, and declare the cause is the vaccine, rather than human error of nurses who accidentally prepared the vaccine with a muscle relaxant instead of water. And now, with little public discourse, the Trump administration has delayed a meeting of the nation’s vaccine experts, purporting to root out undue influence and conflicts of interest in people who have a vested interest in population health. Maybe the secretary will find something—who knows? But in the meantime, he sows doubt and distrust in literally the one thing, other than antibiotics, that explains why so many of us are even alive today to have these conversations.
Nothing in health care is perfect. The human body is complex and individual, and as I said in a previous column, what works for some, won’t work for others. Too many people view the risks of illness from the vaccine as outweighing the risk of getting measles itself, and what’s abundantly clear now is that the risk of getting measles is increasing.
Evidence has shown, repeatedly, that human populations need a vaccine-uptake rate of 95 percent to ensure herd immunity against measles; the U.S. is falling short of that. For the Mennonite community at the center of the Texas outbreak, if their members decided to forego vaccination, everyone around them needed to be vaccinated if those kids stood a chance of not getting sick. And instead, evidence indicates that not enough people in that part of the state are vaccinated. Only 82 percent of people in Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the outbreak, have their measles vaccines. One of the three school districts in Gaines County has an MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine rate of 46 percent. Many schools in Texas harbor dismal MMR vaccination rates.
In the meantime, the antivax movement and the people who think that if the mechanism of prevention we have in front of us isn’t perfect, if it ever fails, we should ban it altogether, downplay measles as no big deal—a few spots and a fever and then we are done.
The sick kids in Texas would disagree.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.