If history someday defines our current political era as one in which America inexplicably allowed preventable, once-defeated diseases to reemerge and ravage society — and that narrative is growing today with alarming clarity — the most baffling part of the story will be how we failed to see it coming.
Today’s deeply misguided anti-vaccination movement didn’t start with the 2020 pandemic, but political resistance to COVID vaccination policies supercharged it. Many have warned in the past few years that politically driven distrust of COVID vaccines would spread to vaccination generally, allowing the revival of measles and other defeated diseases.
And here we are. The scourge of measles — which isn’t always the harmless rite of childhood some imagine and can in fact be fatal — is back, after having been declared effectively eradicated in 2000. During the ensuing decade, cases nationwide were generally confined to fewer than 100 annually. From 2000 through 2024, there was one (one!) U.S. measles death.
But falling vaccination rates in recent years, driven almost entirely by politicized misinformation about vaccines, have predictably undermined that achievement. Last year, the total number of U.S. measles cases topped 2,000 for the first time in more than 30 years, ultimately killing three Americans, two of them children — all of them unvaccinated.
Halfway through 2026, the U.S. has already crossed that 2,000-case threshold, guaranteeing another record-breaking year for a disease that is almost completely preventable. There have been no reported deaths yet this year, but the medical math all but guarantees they are coming.
What are we doing?
The good news is that the vast majority of Americans still understand that vaccination against viral diseases remains the most miraculous medical achievement in human history, bar none. Polls consistently show support for vaccines ranges between 80% and 90% of all Americans — including more than 65% of those who identify with the MAGA movement, according to a poll last year by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the de Beaumont Foundation.
That helps explain why the Trump White House has reportedly ordered Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to pull back on his anti-vaccination rhetoric: not because it’s dangerously corrosive to America’s trust in mainstream medicine but because the administration fears public backlash over that irresponsible rhetoric could cost Republican seats in the November midterms.
That doesn’t mean that RFK is giving up on his medieval mission of undermining solid medical science. The longtime anti-vax zealot — who belongs in charge of the nation’s health apparatus like an arsonist belongs in charge of a fire department — is still “working behind the scenes” to get federal scientists under him to validate ties between vaccines and autism and other thoroughly debunked theories, The New York Times reports.
It may not be possible to draw a straight line between Kennedy’s dangerous crusade and, say, the fact that here in red-state Missouri, measles vaccination rates have fallen to about 90% (95% is considered the threshold for creating “herd immunity” to protect those who, for medical reasons, cannot be vaccinated). But it certainly can’t help.
As predictable as the measles resurgence has been amid diminished vaccination, it’s equally easy to see what’s next. Because it’s so contagious, measles is a “harbinger disease” that foretells coming outbreaks of other diseases. The Times reports that hospitals across the country are already seeing increases in whooping cough and other infections.
Earlier this month, Dr. Gregory Storch, professor of pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, shared his early experiences treating the lesser-known bacterium Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib) and the horrors it ushered in before development of a vaccine in the 1980s:
“The fatality rate was about 3% to 6% and up to 20% of the survivors had brain damage. I saw children recover but be left paralyzed, blind or deaf,” he wrote.
“… Today, thousands of children who potentially would have contracted invasive Hib are alive and well because they were protected from the infection by vaccination. Let’s not give up this great accomplishment. Let’s not turn our backs on life-saving vaccines.”
That’s the overwhelming position of serious medical professionals, regarding not just Hib but the whole range of vaccine-preventable infections.
Don’t take our word for it — and for heaven’s sake, don’t take the word of a federal health agency that has become a dire threat to American’s health. Ask your doctor. As always in the realm of medicine, they know better than your political movement.
