Experts warn that communities underestimate measles’ danger
April 8, 2026
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Experts warn that communities underestimate measles’ danger
A sharp rise in U.S. measles cases is linked to falling MMR vaccination rates and growing immunity gaps
By Kendra Pierre-Louis, Lauren J. Young, Fonda Mwangi & Alex Sugiura
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
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Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman.
It feels increasingly difficult to go a day without hearing about yet another outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease.
In 2024 pertussis, also known as whooping cough, suddenly seemed to be everywhere. Last year the nation recorded the most measles cases since the illness was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, and of course measles outbreaks have grown increasingly common.
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While it’s clear these disease outbreaks are driven by a decline in vaccination rates, we wanted to better understand why people aren’t getting vaccinated, how that impacts public health and what, if anything, we can do about it.
So today, we’re joined by Lauren Young, SciAm’s associate editor for health and medicine, to dig into the subject.
Thanks for joining us.
Lauren Young: Thanks so much for having me.
Pierre-Louis: So you spent several weeks looking into what’s been driving measles outbreaks across the United States.
Young: Yeah, so this has been happening since 2025—we saw this sort of escalation happen in Texas. And we’ve just since then been seeing measles outbreaks in multiple states, from Texas, Arizona, South Carolina, and we’ve been seeing this recent spike happening in Utah and Florida.
So since 2025 we’ve been just seeing, again, this escalation is—in this disease that’s been considered virtually eliminated from the U.S. in 2000. And a huge part of the reason why it’s been eliminated from the country is because of widespread use of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, or the MMR vaccine.
And these are very safe, highly effective vaccines. If kids get the recommended two doses, it offers up to 97 percent protection against measles, and that’s generally for life. But that’s where we’re seeing this hang-up with public health experts in the U.S. We’re hitting this problem in controlling spread, and it’s really hinged on the reluctance to vaccinate.
Pierre-Louis: So what is driving that anti-vaccination? Like, I know a lot of people wanna point simply to Health Secretary RFK, Jr., who has vocally muddied the water on vaccination, but we know that, you know, this was happening even before he became health secretary.
Young: You know, I think a lot of people want a really neat answer, but the truth is it’s quite complicated. And it’s interesting because when you look at, you know, vaccine sentiment as a whole, nationally, people still favor vaccination. But what’s happening is there are these pockets of extremely low rates of vaccination for measles, and that’s where the disease is slipping through.
And a lot of this is a mixture of things like religious beliefs and cultural beliefs that may cause some people to be reluctant to vaccinate. But a lot of this is also coming from misinformation on social media. So for instance, there was an outbreak in 2010, 2011 among Minnesota’s Somali community, and researchers found that they were deliberately being targeted with vaccine misinformation.
So in South Carolina there’s been roughly about 1,000 people who got measles in Spartanburg County, and I spoke with Martha Edwards, the president of the South Carolina chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. And she told me there’s this kind of vaccination story that’s happening there that’s a bit different than what we’re used to hearing, so here’s what she had to say.
Martha Edwards: And it’s often in a community that is reluctant to vaccinate because a lot of them came from, or their parents came from, what was the Soviet Union. And they were mandated to get vaccines there. They felt that it was very repressive, and that was part of what they came to America for.
Because of, sometimes, those political things that had happened back in the Soviet Union times, they are very reluctant to vaccinate. And so often we’ll see a few breakthrough cases, but because historically, the community rates have been high for herd immunity, those cases stay right in that realm. It’s like there’s a little fence, and the virus doesn’t jump out because it’s hard to escap