Measles belongs in history books. Instead, under RFK Jr., it's killing kids. | Opinion
Measles should not be in the news. Yet here we are in 2025, dealing with the spread of an illness that essentially had been eradicated.
In January 2015, a time when anti-vaccine fanatics (and their enablers in the legislature) were persuading gullible parents not to vaccinate their children, a woman from Sun City West named Carol Lee wrote a letter to the editor of The Arizona Republic that read:
“I cannot understand why any parent would decide not to vaccinate their child.
“In the mid-1960s a measles pandemic caught me. I was a school teacher, pregnant and caught the measles from a student. As a result, my beloved son is deaf and had several heart surgeries before he was 10 years old.
“Don’t risk a child’s life withholding immunizations.”
Ten years later, one of the world’s most uninformed anti-vaccine fanatics, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is the nation’s Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary and, for the first time in 10 years, a child has died of measles.
Measles should only exist in history books
The Texas Department of State Health Services said the patient was an unvaccinated school-age child. As of Friday, 146 cases of measles have been reported in the state since late January.
Of this, Kennedy said, “It’s not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year.”
Measles should not be in the news. Measles should be an illness you read about in history books.
Yet here we are in 2025 talking about, worrying about and trying to deal with the spread of an illness that essentially had been eradicated in 2000 in the United States.
And with cases in Texas and New Mexico, there’s a good chance there will be problems in Arizona.
'Only a matter of time' before more kids die
The Arizona Republic’s Stephanie Innes reported on Wednesday about how Arizona law allows schoolchildren here to be unvaccinated if there is a medical reason or for religious or personal reasons. Essentially, for any reason.
The article quotes Phoenix family physician Steven Brown saying, “We have the same threat to vaccination that those other states have. … I think it’s only a matter of time.”
Measles is highly contagious.
The risk for any number of terrible outcomes is severe for unvaccinated children and equally bad for the people who could catch the virus from them. People with compromised immune systems (like cancer patients), other children and ‒ as Carol Lee pointed out a decade ago ‒ pregnant women.
It takes a vaccination rate of 95%, which we had at one time, to create the protection from viruses that we call “herd immunity.” Conspiracy theories and debunked (but still spread) claims have dropped the vaccination rate below that level.
How many deaths will convince us about vaccines?
And measles is back.
Before the vaccine was created, millions of Americans were infected each year, hundreds of them died, many of them children, and nearly 50,000 per year were hospitalized.
We forget.
We forget that polio killed or paralyzed more than half a million people a year before that vaccine was discovered.
We forget, even though it was only a few years ago, that before COVID-19 vaccines were introduced, the disease killed 350,000 Americans.
Estimates are that COVID-19 vaccines saved 20 million lives in just the first year the vaccination was available.
There is no vaccine for ignorance, however. Only death seems to convince people that vaccines are valuable.
Now that measles is back, it’s impossible to know how many dead children it will take for the uninformed, or misinformed, to come around.
More than that one in Texas, I’m afraid.
EJ Montini is a columnist at the Arizona Republic, where this column originally ran. Reach him at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com