Washington D.C. – The U.S. is on the brink of losing its measles elimination status as the latest outbreak this year has risen to at least 126 cases in South Carolina. According to the CDC, “There have been 47 [measles] outbreaks** reported in 2025, and 88% of confirmed cases (1,673 of 1,912) are outbreak-associated. For comparison, 16 outbreaks were reported during 2024.” As The Hill notes: “Jan. 20 of next year will mark 12 straight months of uninterrupted measles transmission.”
While longtime vaccine misinformer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has yet to say anything publicly about the worsening situation in South Carolina, earlier this year Trump’s HHS Secretary had plenty to say about the MMR vaccine itself. During an interview on Fox News in March, Kennedy falsely claimed with no credible evidence that the MMR vaccine leads to “deaths every year”; that it causes “all the illnesses” of the disease; that it “wanes about 4.5% per year;” and “does not appear to provide maternal immunity.”
“In March — well into the measles outbreak in Texas — Secretary Kennedy spewed a litany of falsehoods on national television about the MMR vaccine that undoubtedly scared some Americans out of protecting their children with the long proven safe and effective preventive treatment,” said Kayla Hancock, director of Public Health Watch, a project of Protect Our Care. “While local officials scramble to contain the outbreak, the Trump administration is desperate to skirt responsibility for contributing to the spread of debunked anti-vax misinformation that has left all Americans more vulnerable to completely preventable diseases. We continue to see the tragic consequences mount from Kennedy’s reckless disregard for peer-reviewed science and data in his official capacity as health secretary, while he treats internet conspiracies as the gold standard. Donald Trump seems content to let RFK Jr. keep making alarming and unfounded claims and then waste federal resources trying to prove them after the fact – and well after the damage to our public health has already been done.”
A Pattern of Recklessness: It is not the first time Kennedy has personally fanned the flames of a measles outbreak with unfounded vaccine claims. Most notably, RFK Jr. played a significant role in the deadly measles outbreak in Samoa in 2018 and 2019. Then again this year, Kennedy deliberately sought to sow doubt about the safety of the MRR vaccine before and after the deaths of two children in Texas from a measles outbreak on his watch as health secretary – the first measles deaths in the US since 2015.
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- Reuters, 12/12: Of those infected [with measles in South Carolina], 119 were unvaccinated, three were partially vaccinated with one of the recommended two-dose measles-mumps-rubella vaccines, one was fully vaccinated and three had unknown vaccination status. U.S. medical groups have grown increasingly concerned about the spread of vaccine-preventable diseases under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist.
- The Hill, 12/13: US set to lose measles elimination status: The ‘house is on fire’: Infectious disease experts point to ongoing transmission chains from a West Texas outbreak that began early last year and sickened roughly 800 people. They say the spread and threat to elimination is directly related to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. […] “This is a very clear example of the damage that the anti-vaccine movement has done in the United States,” said Fiona Havers, adjunct associate professor at the Emory School of Medicine and a former infectious disease staffer at the CDC.
- NYT, 12/13: A Measles Outbreak Brings With It Echoes of the Pandemic: What began in the fall as a trickle of measles infections in Spartanburg County, S.C., has since grown into an outbreak that has sickened more than 110 people, prompted more than 250 residents to quarantine and unsettled many more. […] Health officials had already been monitoring the spread of measles in pockets across the country. Nationally, more than 1,900 measles cases have been reported so far this year, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Three unvaccinated people, including two children, have died. […] The level of worry in Spartanburg, though, appears to be correlated with whether or not one believes in the general efficacy of vaccines, an “anti-vax” notion that has been spearheaded in part by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s health secretary.
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