I frequently quip that, with respect to the antivaccine movement, there is never anything new under the sun and everything old is new again. Rarely have I seen a better example than the antivax response to the ongoing measles outbreak in Texas in an undervaccinated population, which, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services, has as of Friday sickened 146 *and counting), hospitalized 20, and claimed the life of one unvaccinated child. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt the need to write about measles, the antivax movement, and the MMR vaccine, but this outbreak, which continues to grow and is being joined by cases and (thus far) smaller outbreaks in a total of ten states (and, likely, counting). Unfortunately, this time around, the person in charge of all nonmilitary health agencies, including the most important one whenever there is any outbreak of infectious disease, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is a longtime antivax activist and conspiracy theorist, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It is accurate to say that, never before in living memory (or even in the history of the US) have we had someone so detached from science and reality at the helm of our federal health agencies. (Not even during the first Trump administration was this the case, and look at how incompetent the initial response was to the COVID-19 pandemic.) That’s why I thought it a good time to write about the measles outbreak and how, unfortunately, this time around a lot of antivax tropes about measles are going to be official government policy.
Buckle up, it’s going to be a painful ride into measles misinformation that I haven’t written about in a while, in the context of an outbreak. I did, however, write about how RFK Jr.’s apologists tried to gaslight the nation about his activities promoting antivax beliefs during the deadly measles outbreak in Samoa in 2019. I’ll get back to that in a moment. First, however, let’s look at the first major trope, namely that measles outbreaks are common and no big deal, the corollary being, “So why are we getting so worked up over measles?”
Quoth RFK Jr. (at first): Measles outbreaks are “not unusual”
Faced with the first outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease on his watch, you might wonder how RFK Jr. would respond. In fairness, the outbreak had started late January, which was before he was sworn in as Secretary of Health and Human Services, although I wouldn’t entirely absolve him given how he has been a key figure in promoting fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about vaccines going back 20 years. Moreover, the the outbreak is still raging and growing; so it’s his responsibility now. One might wonder if, faced with actual responsibility for dealing with a potential public health disaster, RFK Jr. might be chastened. His initial response was not encouraging, given that he said, more or less, that, even after the death of a child—the first measles death in the US in a decade and the first child to die of measles in 22 years—was the outbreak was. As Rex Hippie at USA TODAY noted, when asked about the measles outbreak by a reporter at Trump’s first cabinet meeting last week, RFK Jr. basically shrugged his shoulders:
Kennedy showed his deep empathy and concern for the Texas outbreak, which has now claimed the life of an unvaccinated child, by giving the verbal form of a shoulder shrug during President Donald Trump’s first Cabinet meeting this week.
“There are two people who have died, but we’re watching it,” Kennedy said, with the deep human compassion one expects from a dead-eyed conspiracy theoristwith a taste for roadkill bear-cub meat.
Apparently he’s not watching it too closely. Texas health officials say only one person has died, a child in Lubbock, the first child to die from measles in 22 years. But hey, one death … two deaths … who’s really counting?
It is rather shocking that any HHS Secretary would get such a basic fact wrong, although it is not at all shocking at all that RFK Jr. would. It is even more shocking that any HHS Secretary or federal public health official would respond to a large outbreak that has killed a child with a shoulder shrug and saying, in essence, “Hey, shit happens.”
But, wait, I hear RFK Jr. apologists saying. What about what he posted to X, the hellsite formerly known as Twitter, on Friday, a couple of days after that cabinet meeting? On the surface, it looks as though RFK Jr. has backtracked on his longstanding antipathy towards the MMR vaccine:
You might wonder why RFK Jr. mentioned providing communications materials in Low German. That’s because the focus of the current measles outbreak is in a Mennonite community in western Texas. Many Mennonites speak Plautdietsch, a Low German dialect, for which there appears to be no one accepted written form of the language. In fairness, it should be emphasized that, as was the case many years ago when it was claimed that Amish communities don’t vaccinated, there is nothing inherent in Mennonite beliefs that prohibits vaccination; although some conservative sects do not vaccinate. Indeed, according to one pastor in the area:
In an interview Wednesday, Jake Fehr, the pastor at Seminole’s Mennonite Evangelical Church in Gaines County, said there’s a “misconception” that all Mennonites aren’t vaccinated. The 40-year-old pastor said his entire family has been vaccinated, including himself. All of his children who attend public school are vaccinated, and he estimated that about half of the church’s 800 members who live in the area are also vaccinated.
Since he began working at the church in 2017, Fehr claimed he’s never preached about vaccinations from the pulpit and that Mennonite religious doctrine doesn’t oppose vaccinations of any kind. “We have not been out there teaching against vaccinations or for people not to obey the government,” Fehr told Chron, adding that his “church family hasn’t been affected largely” by the measles outbreak; he was aware of only two cases in his congregation.
Of course, that’s not entirely true, as the story goes on to describe, as it describes just his congregation, which appears to have been lucky thus far (luck that could easily soon run out) given that only half of his congregation’s children have been vaccinated, a percentage far below the 90-95% vaccine uptake threshold needed to achieve herd immunity against measles, which is one of the most highly contagious viruses known to humans:
However, Fehr acknowledged that the church-affiliated private school, where children aren’t required to vaccinate, was one of several Mennonite schools in the area to shut down for several days after an increase in measles cases. He also noted that there’s “some validity to the fact” that a conservative faction of Mennonites, known as Old Colony Mennonites, and conservative non-Mennonites in the majority Republican county haven’t been vaccinated.
“It’s not necessarily that there’s this specific script for reference that they would take as to why they wouldn’t. However, they’re sort of reluctant to adopt a lot of governmental ways,” Fehr said of the unvaccinated individuals. “So, they’ve just made what I would consider to be personal health choices for their families.”
The outbreak has since spread to nine Texas counties and across the border to New Mexico. Whatever the reasons—and, in fairness, it is also noted in this story that this is a rural area where “some people there live a far distance from healthcare options while others choose not to vaccinate due to various reasons and enroll their children in private schools or homeschool.” Likely, a combination of religious beliefs, political ideology, and isolation and distance from easy access to healthcare have contributed to low vaccine uptake in the affected Texas counties.
Regardless of why vaccine uptake had been low in these western Texas counties, the outbreak started there and is growing larger. A child has died. As for providing vaccines to the counties, good. I hope that the CDC is doing that; it’s the bare minimum that the CDC should be doing, although one wonders how RFK Jr.’s fans, who have imbibed deeply of his antivaccine messaging, one of which being that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism and is more dangerous than the disease and portraying all vaccines as unsafe. Indeed, two weeks previously, he had been on Laura Ingraham’s show, where he proclaimed:
Vaccines are the one medical product that is exempt from pre-licensing safety studies.
So I sued HHS a few years ago, in 2018, and I said, show us one study, one pre-licensing study of any of the vaccines that are—72 vaccines that are now mandated for children on the childhood schedule.
After a year of sandbagging, HHS came to the courthouse and handed us a letter saying, yeah, there are no studies.
The only vaccine that is on the childhood study that had a placebo-controlled, double blind trial was the COVID vaccine. None of the other ones have.
That doesn’t mean you have to do that kind of trial now, but you need to know what the risk profile is for these products.
Regular readers will recognize the lies here, namely the misleading half-truth that vaccines in the childhood vaccination schedule have never been tested in a “proper” randomized controlled clinical trial (RCT) versus saline placebo and that safety monitoring is inadequate, both of which have been discussed here multiple times, most recently here and here. Moreover, just because RFK Jr. thinks that vaccines should be held to standards impossible to meet in the real world does not mean that they are “exempt” from pre-licensure safety studies. However, these are not antivax narratives specific to measles. Antivaxxers make these claims for all vaccines. That means it’s time to move on. First, however, let’s take a look at measles cases in the US over the last 25 years:
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As you can see, since 2000, the year when measles was declared to be under control in the US, cases generally remain under 50-100 per year for the entire country. Notable exceptions occurred in 2015, the year of the Disneyland measles outbreak, and in 2018-2019, when waning vaccine uptake combined with waning vaccine-mediate immunity in adults over 50 led to large outbreaks in orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn and Rockland County, New York. So far this year, the trajectory does not look good, with vaccine expert Dr. Peter Hotez predicting that the outbreaks are nowhere near over.
“…you shouldn’t be afraid of the measles”
The claim that measles outbreaks are not unusual is closely related to another favorite measles myth, namely that the measles is not dangerous. This narrative presents the measles as being a harmless childhood disease that just needs to be endured, after which the child will have lifelong immunity to measles. For instance, a week ago antivaxxer Megan Redshaw wrote a post—on Substack, naturally!—entitled Why You Shouldn’t Be Scared of Measles, with the tagline, Measles is not “back” in the U.S. It never left. The mainstream media was ready to go with its same old measles hysteria as soon as RFK Jr. took over HHS. Sound familiar, other than the twist about RFK Jr. heading up HHS? It’s a useful article to point to because Redshaw regurgitates nearly every common antivax talking point about measles in one convenient Substack article, for example, that measles is a harmless childhood disease:
Even before the vaccine hit the scene, measles was considered a routine childhood illness—one that came, went, and left behind lifelong immunity. What the fear-mongers won’t tell you is that measles deaths had already plummeted by over 98% before the vaccine was even introduced, thanks to improved sanitation, nutrition, and access to medical care.
Naturally, to Redshaw it’s all a conspiracy:
The ink had barely dried on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services when the mainstream media—which we now know has been heavily funded by the government through USAID to peddle propaganda—launched a full-scale campaign to preserve the vaccination program and, by extension, the pharmaceutical industry’s lucrative bottom line.
In a synchronized media blitz, headlines screamed of measles outbreaks, with reports of approximately 93 confirmed cases across various states. Of these, 28 cases affected kids under 4 years old, 48 affected kids aged 5 to 17, and 15 cases occurred in adults. The ages of the other cases are unknown.
And, of course:
The media’s narrative, however, is unmistakable: Blame the unvaccinated and, by extension, the new HHS Secretary known for his critical stance on vaccine safety. Then incite public fear, perpetuate misconceptions, and manipulate public opinion. Use this fear to rally against those fighting for medical freedom, religious and philosophical exemptions, and the “vaccine-choice activists.”
As Mrs. Potts, the enchanted teapot in Beauty and the Beast, once said, this is a “tale as old as time.”
Actually, the only “tale as old as time” is how antivaxxers like Redshaw spin every measles outbreak that ever occurs. In any event, Redshaw wrote this post over a week ago. As I pointed out, it’s 146 cases as of Friday (164 nationwide) and the case count will no doubt be higher at the end of this week, when new statistics are reported. Basically, Redshaw’s narrative is no different than the narrative from a particularly bonkers “natural health” grifter, Mike Adams, who proclaimed the measles outbreak a “hoax” and a “pharma psyop.” Same as it ever was, regarding every single measles outbreak I’ve written about for the last 20 years, the sole difference being that the reasons for the hype now also include trying to “tear down” the sainted RFK Jr., who is now in charge of HHS.
I do want to discuss Redshaw’s claim that the vaccine didn’t matter with respect to decreasing mortality from measles. That is an antivax trope that in 2010 I dubbed “vaccines didn’t save us,” a highly intellectually dishonest argument, as explained in the link. The short version is that, while it is true that mortality from measles had plummeted in the decades before the vaccine due to better medical care and nutrition, every year there were still 400-500 people dying of measles, a number that antivaxxers appear to consider unimportant and want to see again (more, actually, given the increase in the US population since the early 1960s), and considerable misery from from the huge numbers of new cases every year (most people caught measles before they turned 15), which resulted in roughly 48,000 hospitalizations per year and 1,000 cases of encephalitis. Redshaw does a common statistical slight-of-hand by pointing to a CDC publication of vital statistics to claim that measles deaths were “almost non-existent before the introduction of the first measles vaccine,” but I note that the graph (Figure 19) shows a death rate per 100,000 population. In 1960, the population of the US was 179,323,175. Less than 1 per 100,000 dying in the early 1960s easily translates into hundreds of deaths. It’s the same statistical trick antivaxxers did with COVID-19, implying that just because “only 0.1-0.2% die” of the disease, then the disease is no big deal, even though that translates to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
But what about measles still being around? While, technically it is true that measles never entirely left the US, it was declared eliminated from the US in 2000, meaning that there had been an entire year without continuous transmission of the virus. Since then, the number of measles cases recorded each year has been so small relative to the total population as to be negligible; indeed it is uncommon for yearly case counts to climb into the triple digits. However, Redshaw’s claim represents an obviously deceptive narrative if you know a little history, as portrayed on this famous graph:
As I said, technically it is true that measles has never quite “gone away,” I’m sure you can see that the roughly 1,200 cases seen in the US in the worst year for measles this century is approximately 500-fold smaller than the average number of cases that were registered every year before the measles vaccine. Also note that this graph is an extreme underestimate of the number of measles cases, which was estimated to be in the millions per year. For example, it is estimated that in 1963, there were >100 million measles cases resulting in 6 million deaths worldwide, with 4 million cases and 450 deaths in the US annually.
One particularly vile variant of this attempt to portray measles as harmless is something I call the Brady Bunch gambit, which I first wrote about in 2015 during the Disneyland measles outbreak. You can read about it in detail here and see a YouTube video by antivaxxers making the claim here:
You might even have seen this meme:
The CliffsNotes version is that in 1969 an episode of The Brady Bunch played measles for laughs. In the episode, all six of the kids caught it. None of them got very sick, and they all enjoyed having a few days off from school. Ultimately the Mike (the father) and Alice (the maid) caught it too, but Carol (the mother) did not because she had had measles as children and thus had post-infection immunity. Antivaxxers pointed to this episode, an episode of The Flintstones from the early 1960s, and a 1950s episode of The Donna Reed Show in which measles was played for laughs on a sitcom as supposed evidence that measles was viewed as no big deal before the vaccine. (I note that the vaccine had existed for six years prior to The Brady Bunch episode cited.)
The facts are that before the vaccine measles was viewed by the medical profession with great concern, hence the effort put into developing a safe and effective vaccine for it. Roughly 1 in 1,000 with measles died; another 1 in 1,000 developed encephalitis; and 20% developed pneumonia. A particularly dreaded consequence of measles is subacute pan-sclerosing encephalitis (SSPE), a devastating fatal late complication affecting 4 to 11 per 100,000 cases of measles, a number that goes up to 18 per 100,000 cases if the child was less than five years old when primarily infected with measles. Moreover, measles causes temporary (but fairly long-lasting) immune amnesia that leads the immune system to “forget” pathogens that it had previously encountered and thus to higher mortality from other infectious disease for up to three years after a case of measles. All this disease, suffering, and death are too high a price to pay for “natural immunity” when a safe and effective vaccine that can prevent them exists.
The vaccine didn’t protect…
It didn’t take long after news of the initial cases of the current outbreak broke for antivaxxers to start promoting a couple of other old tropes. I’m lumping them together here because they are related. One of the first ones is to claim that the vaccine doesn’t protect because there are cases of measles among vaccinated people, sometimes a lot more, which is what I’ll start with. It’s a very obvious statistical trick if you know basic mathematics and think about it more than superficially, but unfortunately most people don’t. To them it sounds convincing. The idea is to look at raw case counts rather than cases per unit of population.
When over 90% of the population is vaccinated, for instance, equal numbers of cases do not imply that the vaccine doesn’t work. Let’s say, for instance, that there are 100 cases of measles, 50 cases in vaccinated people and 50 in unvaccinated people, out of a population of 1,000. (I chose fifty on purpose, because the vaccine is 95% effective, although in reality its efficacy is higher, all to make the numbers easy.) Let’s say now that the vaccine uptake rate is 90% That would mean that 50 people out of 900 people caught the measles, or 5.6%. (OK, I should have chosen a slightly lower number.) However, it would mean that 50 out of 100 unvaccinated people caught the measles, or 50%. It’s the attack rate that matters, not the raw numbers of cases in the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. Antivaxxers pull this trick every time there is a measles outbreak, and not just for measles. Pertussis is a favorite as well for this tactic.
This time around, though, there is a variant to this approach that I’ve been seeing a lot on social media. Redshaw, of course, parrots it:
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 95% of measles cases occurred in individuals classified as either unvaccinated or having an “unknown” vaccination status—a vague category that conveniently includes people who may be fully vaccinated but lack official confirmation. This “unknown” group consistently makes up the majority of measles cases and is routinely lumped in with the unvaccinated to inflate numbers and reinforce the false narrative that outbreaks are driven solely by the unvaccinated.
No, “unknown” means unknown, although I do find it amusing that antivaxxers are attacking the CDC for its reporting now that it’s under RFK Jr.’s control as HHS Secretary. Note the trick here, though. First, the statistics are known and easily found. Let’s look at the actual statistics on the Texas Department of State Health website for the measles cases thus far:
- Not vaccinated: 79
- Vaccination status unknown: 62
- Vaccinated with at least one dose: 5
The website further notes:
- Vaccination status is classified as unknown when the case investigation is still ongoing or when the person does not know if they were ever vaccinated.
- The investigations into the cases who are currently classified as vaccinated are ongoing. A dose of MMR is given to unvaccinated people within 72 hours of their exposure to the measles to lessen the severity of the illness if they get sick from their exposure to the virus. We are looking into if any of these cases received their MMR dose after exposure.
Also, this bit of misdirection on the part of Redshaw and antivax messaging does not change the fact that unvaccinated people are far more likely to contract measles than vaccinated people. Indeed, even if every single case with “unknown” vaccination status were demonstrated to have been vaccinated at least 72 hours before symptoms (highly unlikely), the total number of vaccinated people contracting measles would then be 67. Remember my math above? That would still work out to an attack rate among the vaccinated being very much lower than among the unvaccinated. Most likely, most, but certainly not all, of those with unknown vaccination status are unvaccinated.
Redshaw also uses this sort of tactic of focusing on raw numbers of hospitalizations and complications from measles:
The data also show that 23 patients were hospitalized. Of these, 16 patients are in Texas and nearly half were fully vaccinated. The CDC reports that these 23 hospitalizations were for “isolation” or “management of measles complications,” a broad classification that raises more questions than it answers. Health officials have not provided any details about their underlying health conditions—a key piece of information when it comes to measles severity.
Even accounting for the publication date of the post (more than a week ago) and the higher number of cases reported now on the various government websites, I have to note that nowhere could I find in the link provided by Redshaw evidence that “nearly half” of those hospitalized were fully vaccinated, as that link goes to the Texas Department of State Health statistics that I’ve been citing. If I missed something, I’ll be happy to add an addendum or addition to this post to look at the statistics claimed. According to the CDC there are currently 32 people of 164 who’ve contracted the measles in the entire US who have been hospitalized for measles in 2025 thus far, I’m not seeing how the numbers add up. I would, however, be happy to tack an addendum to this post if anyone finds the source of these figures.
The natural endpoint of this narrative is that the child who died wasn’t killed by measles, because, obviously, if the measles kills someone, then it can’t be a harmless childhood disease. Redshaw’s post was written before there were any deaths due to measles reported. I have no doubt that, if she had written this after reports of the death of an unvaccinated child with measles, she would have included this trope. So we have to look elsewhere.
Unfortunately we don’t have far to look, because RFK Jr.’s old antivax group Children’s Health Defense published in The Defender an article entitled Texas Reports Death of Child Who Tested Positive for Measles, But Releases Few Details. Note the careful wording. They don’t say “child with measles,” but rather “child who tested positive for measles,” the implication being that measles didn’t kill the child. It’s a common tactic used by antivaxxers when people die of complications of vaccine-preventable diseases, like the measles, influenza, and COVID-19 to deny that it was the vaccine-preventable disease that killed them. You might remember this as a favorite tactic during COVID-19, to claim that people died “with” but not “of” COVID-19, particularly when it comes to bacterial pneumonia, which is a frequent complication of viral respiratory diseases.
Indeed, leave it to an chemical engineer turned incompetent biologist to trot out that very claim:
But Brian Hooker, Ph.D., Children’s Health Defense (CHD) chief scientific officer, said it’s too early to assume that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, which targets measles, would have prevented the child’s death.
“It is very easy and almost by design that we would jump to the conclusion that the vaccine would have saved this child. But we have no real information at this point.”
For instance, a medical doctor in the Lubbock, Texas area told The Defender he received a text message that suggested the child may have died from pneumonia, which can be a complication from measles.
“Health Ranger Danger” Mike Adams is also pushing this narrative:
The recent media frenzy over a supposed measles outbreak has been met with skepticism by health freedom advocates. Mike Adams, founder of Brighteon and host of Brighteon Broadcast News, has called the panic a “total hoax.” He highlights a recent case in Texas where a child reportedly died “with measles,” not “from measles.”
“The child died in a hospital, and the cause of death was likely something else entirely,” Adams explains. “They probably used a PCR test to claim the child had measles, but that doesn’t mean measles was the cause of death. This is fearmongering at its worst.”
Adams also points to the hypocrisy of the media, which ignores the hundreds of thousands of children injured or killed by vaccines while amplifying rare cases of measles. “The corporate media doesn’t care about the 1.5 million Americans killed by the COVID vaccine,” he says. “But one child dying with measles? Suddenly, it’s a national emergency.”
Same as it ever was, be it measles or COVID-19. Adams even goes further and takes it in a truly deranged direction, as you can see if you like by listening to the video linked in the quote starting around the 12:00 mark by claiming that the child was dying of something else and that they “faked” the PCR test.
Here’s a hint: If the unvaccinated child had measles and died of a superimposed pneumonia, measles killed the child; the pneumonia was a complication of measles. It’s no different than if you have a heart attack and then go into congestive heart failure, which kills you. The heart attack killed you; the congestive heart failure was how it killed you. Another way of looking at it: If a child gets viral encephalitis due to a measles infection, it was still the measles that killed the child; the encephalitis was how the measles killed the child.
If blaming complications doesn’t work, then blame the victim’s health:
The last measles death reported in the U.S., in 2015, was a young woman with underlying health issues that required her to take immunosuppressive drugs, according to the Seattle Times.
Because if the person killed by measles had other conditions, such as a suppressed immune system, then measles is still a perfectly “harmless” disease. Indeed, here comes the vitamin A, citing antivax physician Liz Mumper:
“I eagerly await details about age, prior state of health and circumstances of the reported death before jumping to conclusions. My condolences to the family who must be devastated,” she said.
In an earlier interview with The Defender, Mumper explained that effective treatments for measles include vitamin A in high doses and attention to hydration status.
“Many natural methods to help the body fight viruses, like extra vitamin D and vitamin C are effective but not widely recommended by mainstream medicine,” she added.
Elsewhere, Dr. Vincent Iannelli describes how antivaxxers are coming up with all sorts of nonsense claims regarding this unfortunate child:
Dr. Iannelli describes why this is nonsense:
Measles has a 7 to 21 day incubation period!
If the child was hospitalized just last week for RSV, there would not have been enough time for them to be exposed, get sick, and then die with measles.
See what I mean? If a child dies of measles, to antivaxxers it must have been either because something else other than measles killed them, because they were sick to begin with, or because they didn’t avail themselves of any of the “natural” preventatives and remedies, like vitamin A. Of course, while it is true that in populations living in underdeveloped countries, low vitamin A levels are associated with increased severity and mortality from measles infections. However, there is no evidence that administering vitamin A to people with adequate vitamin A levels can prevent measles or lessen its severity:
Vitamin A is less commonly used for measles cases in the U.S., according to the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. Doctors say one reason may be that most Americans have enough vitamin A in their diet.
“I think the big caveat of all of this is that there’s a significantly higher rate of vitamin A deficiency in developing countries,” said Dr. Alexandra Yonts, infectious disease specialist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. “So it is less clear whether there is any benefit in populations like in the U.S. and other developed countries.”
While recommending vitamin A is probably not dangerous, it probably won’t help US children with measles. I look at it as the narrow part of the wedge at the CDC that will be used to open the door to more antivax narratives and even to some outright quackery becoming CDC-recommended guidelines. Start with a fairly unobjectionable recommendation with little evidence that is probably harmless, and then add to it. That’s what I see happening.
Finally, if all of the above antivax tactics fail, blame the vaccine for measles and deaths!
…the vaccine kills!
CHD isn’t satisfied just claiming that the vaccine didn’t protect and that the unvaccinated child who died didn’t die of measles but rather “with” measles. Oh, no. They have to insinuate that it might have been the MMR vaccine that killed the child:
An additional text message received by the same medical doctor revealed the medical staff in the child’s area were instructed to give the MMR vaccine to children who were already infected with measles — even though Merck, maker of the most common MMR vaccine, states the vaccine should not be given to anyone experiencing a moderate to high fever, one of the most common symptoms of measles.
It has yet to be confirmed that the child who was reported unvaccinated against measles was not given an MMR vaccine as an acute treatment for the child’s measles infection.
As I quoted from the Texas Department of State Health website above, MMR can decrease the severity of measles if administered within 72 hours of a measles exposure. How much do you want to make a bet that the above is a misinterpretation of this standard recommendation to administer a dose of MMR to those exposed to measles? I’m sure that The Defender will be happy to provide the text of the actual message or messages sent out to doctors and medical staff in West Texas. Somehow I doubt that doctors were being instructed to give MMR to children to treat children with active measles; far more likely it was being suggested that they vaccinate children with a known exposure within the last 72 hours. Naturally, The Defender goes on to harp on how it is now rare to die from measles. Of course it is! That’s because of the success of the vaccination program!
A more common variant of “the vaccines done it” is the claim that it is actually the vaccine, not the virus, that is responsible for outbreaks. I happened upon a rather extreme case of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy with respect to this common antivax talking point. It’s by someone named John Fleetwood. It’s on—of course!—Substack and entitled Free Measles Vaccine Campaign Followed by Measles Outbreak in Texas County, with the tagline Measles vaccine contains live virus that can shed onto unvaccinated. Yes, it’s the old “shedding” claim, this time after a free vaccine clinic held in Texas:
Immediately following the vaccine handouts, the Texas Department of State Health Services announced the Gaines County measles outbreak had increased to 48 cases, a 242% increase.
Most cases were in children 5 to 17 years old.
However, health officials suspect as many as 200 to 300 people are now infected in Gaines County.
The timing of the outbreak’s surge—immediately following a mass vaccination campaign using a live-virus vaccine—raises serious questions about whether the shots themselves played a role in fueling the spread of measles in West Texas.
Of course, this is a very silly argument indeed. Why was Texas offering free MMR vaccine? Because cases of measles had been reported in an undervaccinated population and the health department t was trying to get ahead of the breakout. Here’s the thing. Measles is so transmissible that in an outbreak in an undervaccinated population cases will start with a few cases and then rise exponentially, which is exactly what was observed. It’s not at all surprising that case counts rose as quickly as what was observed. The vaccine had nothing to do with it, and the vaccination program might even have slowed the rate of increase, although we likely will never know for sure.
Recall that the MMR vaccine is a live attenuated virus vaccine. Such vaccines use a weakened version of the pathogenic virus that doesn’t cause full disease but does stimulate immunity to the “wild type” virus; i.e., the naturally occurring virus that causes disease. If there’s one thing you can count on antivaxxers to do, it’s to claim that live attenuated virus vaccines cause the disease that they are designed to prevent and that those vaccinated with such vaccines “shed” virus that can infect others, and, really, shedding is mainly an issue with the oral polio vaccine, not MMR. It’s true that some pediatric cancer centers in the past used to caution the parents of immunosuppressed patients to keep their children separated from recently vaccinated children, but that was more out of an abundance of caution than anything else. None of this stops antivaxxers from JAQing off (“just asking questions”) about the strains of measles virus that caused the measles cases. Cue Megan Redshaw again:
Health officials have not disclosed whether the measles strain responsible for recent outbreaks is vaccine-derived or wild-type, nor have they released details regarding the virus’s genetic sequencing.
Multiple strains of the measles virus can cause measles outbreaks, and the MMR vaccine contains a live attenuated virus that can replicate within the body and infect other people. But let’s not talk about that inconvenient little detail, shall we? Let’s not talk about the fact that live vaccines have and do cause outbreaks.
No, the measles vaccine cannot cause an outbreak due to shedding. It can, however, cause a fever and a rash, which is not measles, but that doesn’t stop Redshaw from going on:
The CDC even admitted this was occurring until it quietly scrubbed its website. The agency previously stated that 5-10% of people vaccinated with MMR develop a fever and rash post-vaccine. Given the number of vaccine doses given to infants, that means there could be 650,000–1,300,000 cases of vaccine-induced measles in the U.S. each year.
No, getting a rash and fever after measles vaccination is not the same thing as getting the measles. Note the conflation of the two, though. Whether it’s intentional or due to ignorant cluelessness, you can decide for yourself. At least in the case of measles, it is an actual virus being used in the vaccine. The super clueless version of the “shedding” myth claimed that mRNA from COVID-19 vaccines could be “shed” and cause disease, when that is actually physically impossible based on the design of the vaccine and the lack of viable virus. In any event, I the claim that it was the vaccine strain that caused an outbreak is a longstanding antivax trope. They used it during the Disneyland measles outbreak, and it wasn’t the vaccine strain that caused the outbreak. RFK Jr. himself trotted out this old antivax chestnut in his letter to the Samoan Prime Minister in 2019 during the middle of a a very deadly measles outbreak, and, again, it was not the vaccine strain causing the outbreak.
As Dr. Iannelli explains:
As Dr. Iannelli explains:
In this measles outbreak, as in all others, we find that:
Lastly, if it wasn’t the vaccine strain that caused the measles outbreak, it was still the vaccine, especially any deaths. How? The claim is that the vaccine supposedly selects for more virulent strains of measles. Indeed, RFK Jr. trotted out this antivax gem in the same letter to the Samoan Prime Minister, which I discussed (and deconstructed) recently. Basically, it’s a variant of a claim made by the godfather of the 21st century antivaccine movement, Andrew Wakefield himself, who made a highly fallacious argument that measles vaccinations select for such virulent strains of measles that they could cause a mass extinction of humans. I kid you not. If you really want to know the details of why this claim is unsupportable, feel free to read this. Part of the basis of the claim is that leaky vaccines (vaccines that do not fully suppress transmission) can in some cases observed in animals lead to selection for more virulent strains. It’s a claim that RFK Jr. made not just in Samoa but was making a year ago. Spoiler alert: MMR is not a leaky vaccine.
Everything old is new again…sort of
I realize that I sometimes repeat things enough to irritate some readers. One of these is that there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to antivax narratives, which is definitely true, although there are sometimes new variants of the same basic narratives. With the re-emergence of measles, starting in west Texas, with additional outbreaks in a number of states, it is important to be familiar with these old antivax narratives about measles, as well as their variants. You will see them a lot more. While there might be nothing new under the sun in terms of these narratives, there is one disturbingly new twist in 2025, which is that some, if not all, of these variants could easily become official CDC policy and advice, given that they have all been promoted in the past by our new HHS Secretary, who is likely going to try to downplay or eliminate the role of vaccines in public health, while stoking fears that vaccines are not safe and do not work. Depressingly, he now has unprecedented power and influence to do just that. What a scary time to be alive.
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