A school-age measles child died in Texas this week, marking the first American death in 10 years. The child was one of dozens of unvaccinated unvaccinated children who were infected with measles during the outbreak of two multinational states officially excluded by the United States 25 years ago.
Public health officials in Texas and New Mexico are responding faithfully with vaccine clinics, contact tracing and exposure alerts, so people are still sick with diseases that can be prevented with this vaccine. Measles is one of the most contagious diseases on the planet, so it will take some time before this outbreak ends. More people get sick. Hopefully no one else will die.
However, during a press conference that same day, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary to the Department of Health and Human Services, downplayed the scope of the outbreak. “That’s not uncommon,” he said. Other measles were the last time this year, saying that most of the hospitalized children are in isolation, meaning they are not sick, but are isolated to prevent the spread of the disease.
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This is not true. This year’s outbreak is rare. For one, this was our third outbreak in 2025, and we’ve only been two months. Second, at least 133 cases have been confirmed in the current Texas/New Mexico outbreak. RFK Jr. was also wrong about the “quarantined” child. They are hospitalized not because they leave them isolated, but because they struggle to breathe.
You should not fight the diseases you once excluded. We should not fill children who can live longer. We should not look while others are suffering. RFK, Jr. Anti-Baksin advocates including sowed around the vaccination of children, and due to all political declarations of conscientious objections and freedom of choice, this child had no choice. There were no other people who were ill either. When it comes to public health, our choices don’t stop with us. And our leaders simply don’t recognize it.
Of course, there are medical reasons why some children cannot get the vaccine. This is not about them. This is the million reasons why we, as a nation, have determined that our collective health is less important than our individual desires. We saw this play during Covid. This has led to more than 1 million lives at the peak of the pandemic between 2020 and 2022. People don’t trust the government. They don’t trust doctors. They don’t trust scientists. They don’t trust the vaccine. Instead, many of us trust people who tell us what we want to hear. We trust the evidence we like and throw away the rest. We don’t want to tell you what to do.
But by believing in what you want to believe, and trusting the evidence that we gather and improve everyone’s health based on those who challenge us, we fall into a trap of what the misinformation is trying to do.
The measles vaccine is a perfect example.
For decades, people around the world have been inoculated with live, attenuated viruses. This is a strain from the measles virus and is amputated at the knee. It teaches our immune system to recognize and attack real wild viruses without making us sick. But some of us do. It has not been a severe case of rash, fever, and measles since a small number of people have been vaccinated. (And even a two-dose vaccine regimen gets sick anyway.) And this is something you can see on social media as people blame the vaccine itself for causing measles. Don’t worry about how the poor child suffered if they contracted a real, complete infection that could cause swelling in the brain, difficulty breathing, or actual death.
Or, as RFK Jr. did in Samoa, they look at rare evidence of two measles and vaccine-related deaths and declare that the cause is a vaccine. And now, with little public discourse, the Trump administration aims to delay a meeting of national vaccine experts and eradicate excessive influence and conflicts of interest on those with vested interests in the health of the population. Maybe the secretary will find something – who knows? But in the meantime, he literally harbors doubt and disbelief for one thing, literally explaining why so many of us are alive today.
There’s nothing perfect in healthcare. The human body is complex and individual, and as I said in the previous row, what works for some people doesn’t work for others. Too many people are seeing the risk of illness from vaccines outweigh the risk of getting measles itself, and what is now plentiful is the increased risk of getting measles.
It has repeatedly shown that human populations need a vaccine adoption rate of 95% to ensure herd immunity to measles. The US has not reached that point. For the Mennonite community at the heart of the Texas outbreak, everyone around them had to get vaccinated if members decided to vaccinate them, if those children were likely not to get sick. Instead, there is evidence that sufficient people in that part of the state are not vaccinated. Only 82% of people in Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the outbreak, have the measles vaccine. One of Gaines County’s three school districts has a MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine rate of 46%. Many schools in Texas are hugging the miserable MMR of MMR vaccination rates.
In the meantime, if the anti-Bucks movement and prevention mechanisms are right in front of us, even if it fails completely, we need to ban it completely and not underestimate anything big.
Sick children in Texas disagree.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author and the author are not necessarily those of science-Americans.
