The U.S. recently reached a grim milestone: As of July 23, more measles cases have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention than in any year since 1991. It took less than seven months to blow past the three-decade high recorded last year.
This potentially deadly disease is easily prevented. Shots are widely available and, in many cases, free. Still, since the beginning of last year, more than 4,850 people here have been infected, and three have died. Among them were two unvaccinated girls in West Texas whose deaths made national headlines.
It may feel like the continuous stream of cases is just the way things are now. But it is dangerous to shrug off the resurgence of measles. In a story I reported earlier this year, I showed what’s happened in parts of the world that have let their guard down to vaccine-preventable diseases. My reporting found that long-forgotten scourges roared back, killing and disabling children. Even countries that made what seemed like subtle changes to immunization policies suffered disastrous consequences years later.
Babies were born blind, deaf and with intellectual disabilities because their mothers caught rubella in the early weeks of pregnancy. Parents saw why diphtheria used to be known as “the strangling angel of children.” Doctors told me they couldn’t undo the damage when these horrors returned. Modern medicine can do a lot of things, but it can’t reverse paralysis from polio.
The story also showed how Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official, and President Donald Trump have been transforming a government that for decades promoted the lifesaving benefits of shots into one that sows doubts about their safety. Last week, the president issued another executive order that’s sure to fuel further hesitancy about the shot that has protected children from measles, mumps and rubella for decades.
It’s a sharp departure for a government that, since the 1960s and with bipartisan support, built vaccination programs that shielded kids from deadly and disabling diseases. Federal and state health leaders strengthened those policies based on lessons learned from measles outbreaks. That’s because measles, among the most contagious diseases in history, is almost always the first vaccine-preventable disease to strike when immunization rates fall.
In my many months of reporting for that story, I learned that measles is like the bright dye that plumbers flush through pipes to find leaks in a complex system. The continued appearance of the virus’ telltale rash in state after state since last year warns of cracks in our once-solid protection, leaving communities vulnerable to other deadly contagions.
My reporting also found that access to vaccines may be in peril: Since last year, Kennedy has been considering changes to an obscure but crucial government program that could prompt the few companies that make vaccines for American kids to flee the U.S. market. If that were to happen, even parents who still want vaccines for their kids wouldn’t be able to get them.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said the agency has not limited access to vaccines. In an email, the spokesperson wrote, “Secretary Kennedy believes that trust is rebuilt through an open review of safety data, the willingness to ask the hard questions, and ensuring the American people have all emerging information as soon as we know it.”
Several dozen people who’ve worked on U.S. government vaccination programs here and around the world conveyed to me a sense of foreboding about America. They fear that children will wind up fighting for their lives against infections that have long been preventable.
“I think there always was a worst-case scenario,” said Dr. Melinda Wharton, who retired last September after more than three decades leading CDC immunization programs. “I don’t think I imagined it could or would be this bad.”
Doctors I spoke to told me they had seen images of those diseases in textbooks, but these were problems medicine had solved long ago. They never thought they’d see an actual patient until an unvaccinated child lay before them, gravely ill with one of these ancient scourges.
I’ll never forget what one German doctor, whose hospital treated an unvaccinated boy who later died of diphtheria, told me of the infection: “It was taught as history,” he said.
Here in the U.S., measles was taught as history, too. Now it isn’t.
We’ve been covering public health and vaccine policies for years. Let me walk you through reporting from my colleagues and me that helps show how we ended up here and where we might go.
Oct. 15, 2020
Inside the Fall of the CDC
In 2020, I reported with my colleagues on how the world’s greatest public health organization was brought to its knees by COVID-19, the president and the capitulation of its own leaders. And we also foreshadowed how the government’s response to COVID-19 led to a loss of trust in public health institutions — a lingering resentment that RFK Jr. has tapped into. (The CDC and the White House declined to comment on this story.)
March 28, 2025
The CDC Buried a Measles Forecast That Stressed the Need for Vaccinations
At the beginning of the second Trump administration, I learned that CDC leaders ordered staff not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles was high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates were lagging.
In an aborted plan to roll out the news, the agency would have emphasized the importance of vaccinating people against the disease that had then infected fewer than 500 people in 19 states, the records show. (At the time, the CDC told us that the agency decided against releasing the assessment “because it does not say anything that the public doesn’t already know” and that the agency continued to recommend vaccines as “the best way to protect against measles.”)
July 17, 2025
RFK Jr. Wants to Change a Program That Stopped Vaccine Makers From Leaving the U.S. Market. They Could Flee Again.
Not long after I broke the news about the buried measles forecast, I learned more about a vaccine program that RFK Jr. plans to overhaul, one that’s vital to Americans’ access to immunizations. I showed how dramatic changes to this little-known program — which offers payouts for people who suffer rare side effects from shots without having to prove that drugmakers were negligent — could prompt vaccine makers to stop selling them here.
(HHS declined to answer detailed questions about Kennedy’s plans. Previously, an HHS spokesperson had said that Kennedy is “not anti-vaccine — he is pro-safety.”)
That story laid bare how surprisingly fragile the nation’s vaccine system is. Kennedy still hasn’t revealed what he plans to do.
March 27, 2026
What Could Happen if Americans Who Wanted Vaccines Couldn’t Get Them?
Two Stanford epidemiologists had modeled the scenario. My colleague Lucas Waldron created a chilling visualization that allowed us to depict how many people could die or be disabled in 25 years if vaccines for polio, measles, rubella or diphtheria were no longer available.
ProPublica shared the key findings of that scenario with HHS. An agency spokesperson didn’t address the modeling but said “HHS has not limited access or insurance coverage to any FDA-approved vaccines” and routinely recommends the shots for children.
June 8, 2026
What ProPublica Found in the Genetic Code of America’s Measles Outbreaks
As measles cases continued to rise, a team at the CDC was investigating whether the disease has become endemic in this country again. In June, my colleague Nat Lash and I showed how hard it will be for them to prove that it isn’t, after what Nat found when he analyzed the genetic code of cases around the country.
A CDC spokesperson told ProPublica that the agency was conducting a more comprehensive investigation and that genetic sequences “alone cannot determine whether” measles is endemic.
