from the health-don’t-care dept
Roughly two weeks ago, in a post about how America was risking losing its elimination status for measles as the current outbreak is exploding thanks to the inaction from RFK Jr. and his Health and Human Services department, I wrote the following paragraph:
At the start of April, we were at 483 confirmed reported measles cases. Roughly two weeks later, we sit at 712. That’s something like a 50% increase in cases over the course of two weeks. Doubling cases ever month would cause us to easily eclipse 2019’s measles cases, the year in which we had the most cases since 2000, totaling 1,249 cases. Unless HHS and the CDC do something drastic, we could reach that number in a month or two.
Since then, the infection rate has basically kept up the pace. The country now sits with more than 900 confirmed cases of measles at least, pending any delayed reports of additional cases and putting aside the fact that the case number is almost certainly underreported. That drastic action I and health officials throughout the country called for has not happened. There has been no alteration of language or messaging coming from HHS or Kennedy. No vaccination campaigns. Hell, Kennedy’s vaunted “healers” are strolling into healthcare facilities knowing they’re infected with measles and treating patients anyway.
The end result is that we’re going to blow right past not only the record case numbers of 2019, which were largely driven by a localized outbreak among religious groups in New York, but also the next highest year in the 90s, which was before the disease achieved elimination status in America.
The cases and deaths are breaking records. In the past 30 years, the only year with more measles cases than the current tally was 2019, which saw 1,274 cases. Most of those cases were linked to large, extended outbreaks in New York City that took 11 months to quell. The US was just weeks away from losing its elimination status, an achievement earned in 2000 when the country first went 12 months without continuous transmission.
In 2019, amid the record annual case tally, cases had only reached a total of 704 by April 26. With this year’s tally already over 900, the country is on track to record a new high. Before 2019, the next highest case total for measles was in 1994. That year, the country saw 899 cases, which 2025 has already surpassed.
This is actually worse than these numbers might make it seem for two reasons. First, while the overall infection numbers might feel low to us because we just came off another pandemic that had infection numbers in the millions, it’s important to remember that we’re still in the something like the bottom of the 1st inning here if no real action is taken. The problem of infectious diseases, particularly a disease as infectious as measles, is an exponential problem. Measles cases are currently nearly doubling on a monthly basis. 900 cases today is likely to become 1,500 cases by the end of May. Then 3,000 June, or more, if the exponentiality of the increase continues.
There’s also the problem of our continuing falling vaccination rates for the MMR vaccine. So while 2019 wasn’t that long ago, thanks to vaccine skeptics (at best) like RFK Jr. and his elevation to the highest healthcare office in the land, we’re actually more vulnerable in 2025 than we were in 2019.
If current vaccination levels are maintained, the model estimated that the US will see around 850,000 measles cases over the next 25 years, with about 170,000 hospitalizations and 2,500 deaths. If vaccination levels fall by 10 percent, estimated cases in the next 25 years would rise to 11 million.
In a measles update published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, agency researchers also warned that the US is heading backward to an era where measles is constantly present and spreading in the US.
Perhaps this whole Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA movement, needs to be renamed MAMA. Make America Measles-y Again.
Filed Under: cdc, dead kids, epidemic, hhs, maha, measles, rfk jr.
