Congrats to RFK Jr., As the U.S. Is Poised to Lose Its Measles Elimination Status After 25 Years

Who would have thought that pushing unproven treatments for measles and discouraging parents from getting their children vaccinated for measles might end up being correlated with skyrocketing measles cases in 2025? The answer to that question certainly wouldn’t be Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who must have been acting in total good faith when he did the above things throughout this calendar year. Now, he’s about to be rewarded with a dubious honor: The U.S. will almost certainly lose its measles elimination status within a few more weeks, making the disease officially labeled as endemic within the U.S. for the first time in a quarter century. The country will follow Canada, which likewise lost its elimination status in November, and will beat Mexico to the same mark, which will likely lose its own elimination status in February. Quite a thing to preside over for RFK Jr., to welcome back measles to our native disease rolodex after 25 years.

A disease in the U.S. is considered formally eliminated following investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in collaboration with regional and international entities like the Pan American Health Organization and the World Health Organization. In short, a disease is considered “eliminated” not when every single case ceases (as travelers can bring isolated cases back with them from elsewhere), but when endemic transmission of the disease is interrupted for a long enough period. Measles is considered eliminated in a country after a year in which its spread is not continuous, a mark that the U.S. is about to fail to meet. Since the extremely contagious disease began its 2025 surge in the U.S. around Jan. 20, 2025, not a single week has passed without additional measles reports, with 2,065 confirmed cases reported this year by the CDC to date. That means that unless the transmission of the disease suddenly stops in the next few weeks–which is extremely unlikely given ongoing outbreaks in South Carolina and elsewhere–that the U.S. will no longer be able to say that the disease is eliminated. At this time, only seven U.S. states can say they’ve had no measles cases this calendar year.

The 2025 measles surge, the most cases overall in the U.S. since the tail end of the 1989-1991 outbreak that sickened more than 55,000 people, began in West Texas. The epicenter was Gaines County, where the youngest schoolchildren had only a 77% vaccination rate for the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, which is recommended for universal administration in two childhood doses, and has been given in the U.S. since 1963. That rate is far, far below the 95%-and-above mark that is considered necessary to prevent transmission and circulation of the measles, widely regarded as perhaps the most infectious virus on Earth. A single person infected with measles spreads the disease, on average, to 12-18 potential other people. And spread it did, with subsequent serious outbreaks this year in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and most recently in South Carolina, where almost 300 people are still quarantined due to the likelihood of exposure to a disease that has a 21-day incubation/gestation period. This has subsequently thrown the South Carolina school system in these areas into disarray, as some unvaccinated kids have effectively missed half the school year already due to multiple quarantine periods. The disease has flashed its deadly potential: Three in the U.S. have died of measles in 2025, including one unvaccinated adult in New Mexico and two school-aged unvaccinated children in Texas, while unvaccinated parents reportedly attempted to ward off the disease from their kids with treatments that included cod liver oil and fistfuls of vitamins.

When you say that “only the sick kids die from the measles”… you’re telling sick and disabled people that they’re expendable.

You’re telling them their lives don’t matter.

That vaccinating to protect them is too high a price.

That’s eugenics.

Also, healthy kids die from measles too.

— Kelly (@broadwaybabyto.bsky.social) Dec 29, 2025 at 12:21 AM

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., meanwhile, who one would expect to have spent the year mobilizing a historic vaccination campaign–which is how the disease was eliminated in the first place–instead spent his time waffling over whether the MMR vaccine is considered safe, while praising and touting alternative treatments for people already infected with measles rather than attempting to prevent those infections in the first place. In the wake of the West Texas outbreak, RFK Jr. touted several medications as direct measles treatments that have no scientific literature backing them up for treatment of the disease, the steroid budesonide and the antibiotic clarithromycin. There are no approved drugs specifically proven to help those infected with measles recover faster, but that didn’t stop Kennedy from claiming that those meds had “very, very good results” in treating Texas children in vaccine-distrusting Mennonite communities in particular. Two of those very children went on to die: 6-year-old Kayley Fehr and 8-year-old Daisy Hildebrand. It should go without saying that neither was vaccinated. The last time a child died of measles in the U.S. before this was in 2003.

As for the actual MMR vaccine, meanwhile, Kennedy has often talked out of both sides of his mouth, encouraging families and parents to get their children vaccinated at one moment and then casting doubt and dispersion on the same vaccine the next. He’s said that “the federal government’s position is, my position is, people should get the measles vaccine,” but followed it a sentence later by saying that “but the government should not be mandating those.” Likewise, Kennedy has claimed that “we’re always going to have measles, no matter what happens, as the vaccine wanes very quickly.” It’s hard to say what the hell he even thinks he’s talking about in that case, given that the two doses of the MMR vaccine, given in childhood, are considered to literally confer lifelong protection that is roughly 97% effective. How exactly does Kennedy think that the disease was eliminated in the U.S. in the first place? Can someone with access to the man please ask him this? Could this have something to do with why almost 7,000 current and former Health and Human Services employees signed a letter in September calling for RFK Jr.’s resignation?

This is the grand irony of the current measles disaster unfolding in slow motion in the United States: We’ve literally already seen exactly what it looks like when a high enough vaccination rate leads to transmission of the virus practically stopping in this country. Following the 1989-1991 outbreak, which was driven by–surprise–falling vaccination rates, a renewed focus on public vaccination led to impressively sharp declines in the disease. By the mid-1990s, the yearly numbers were as low as 100 cases. In the 2000s, after it was first declared eliminated, yearly cases were less than 100 on an annual basis, with only 37 total cases in 2004. We had well and truly beaten measles as a disease, thanks to the effectiveness of the vaccine, which has now been tested and retested over generations for more than 60 years. It was only a coordinated, decades-long effort by quack doctors, grifters, conspiracy theorists and the Republicans who embraced them that allowed us to get back to this point.

@drobrienmd.bsky.social

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— Physicians for a Healthy Democracy (@physiciandemocracy.medsky.social) Dec 30, 2025 at 7:05 PM

With that said, this is by no means only a problem for the United States to face. The spread of measles in the Americas in 2025 involves more than 13,000 cases, with the vast majority–95% or more!–specifically in the United States, Canada and Mexico. To put things in perspective: This is more than 30 times the total number of measles cases reported across North, Central and South America in 2024, a truly staggering rate of increase.

Canada actually beat the U.S. to the punch both in elimination of the disease, which was declared in 1998, and the loss of that status, which happened in November following a year that has seen at least 5,377 cases, including two deaths of babies that were infected in utero. The Public Health Agency of Canada subsequently declared that the virus would once again be considered endemic, saying that “this loss represents a setback, of course, but it is also reversible.” In Mexico, meanwhile, roughly 6,000 confirmed measles cases have been determined to date, although this may actually be a conservative estimate. At least 24 people have died.

It all begs the question: How much worse will the return of measles be allowed to get by U.S. federal agencies and the man who is meant to serve as the symbolic head of our disease prevention efforts? Is more than 2,000 measles cases in the United States an acceptable number to RFK Jr., along with a handful of deaths, including the deaths of children? How about 5,000 cases? 10,000? How many digits would it take for him to prioritize efforts to boost our national vaccination rate by the kinds of meaningful numbers that it would take to head off these outbreaks before they get truly out of control? How many deaths are acceptable to members of Congress before they unite in calling for Kennedy’s head? What would it take to convince parents to vaccinate their kids, now that an anti-science culture has been normalized by politicians and TV doctors?

Remember when the United States was expected to lead the way in the deployment of cutting-edge science and preventative care when it came to communicable diseases? Remember 20 years ago, when there were fewer total measles cases in this country than there were total states? This is one of the few cases where we genuinely could “get back to that” … but it would require the population, and its right-wing leaders, to prioritize their health and the health of others over superstition, politics, and obstinance disguised as liberty. And in 2026, we’ll see just how many people would rather let their child die of an easily prevented disease rather than suffer the indignity of admitting that they were wrong. And I hope RFK Jr. has to answer for every bit of it.