Here’s something you never really want to see, on a line graph charting the spread of an incredibly infectious disease: A vertical line. And yet, how else to describe what measles has been doing in the United States through the first month of 2026? This is the kind of chart that crypto-bros fantasize about, except instead of depicting to-the-moon gainz on memecoins, it’s mostly depicting American children who are dangerously ill, and telling us in no uncertain terms that a whole lot more kids are about to be sick as well. Measles has broken containment: Even after a “historic” year for the disease, in which the nation is poised to lose the elimination status it has…
Here’s something you never really want to see, on a line graph charting the spread of an incredibly infectious disease: A vertical line. And yet, how else to describe what measles has been doing in the United States through the first month of 2026? This is the kind of chart that crypto-bros fantasize about, except instead of depicting to-the-moon gainz on memecoins, it’s mostly depicting American children who are dangerously ill, and telling us in no uncertain terms that a whole lot more kids are about to be sick as well. Measles has broken containment: Even after a “historic” year for the disease, in which the nation is poised to lose the elimination status it has had since 2000, the new year is looking like it will be far, far worse. If your child is unvaccinated, you might as well start assuming that they’ll be catching measles in 2026.
US measles cases this year already exceed the total for the whole of 2023 and 2024 combined, and it is only January. Yikes.
— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran.com) Jan 29, 2026 at 3:29 PM
The commenter on that chart actually understates it: The total of nearly 600 confirmed measles cases so far from the Centers for Disease Control isn’t just more than the whole of 2023 and 2024 combined–it’s more than the entirety of 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 combined. That’s more measles cases in one month, than we had in 60 months between 2020-2024.
This month’s cases have been cropping up around the country, in 17 different states, but the largest driver continues to be the severe outbreak in South Carolina, predominantly in the northwestern county of Spartanburg, which—surprise—is home to low MMR vaccination rates. There, the outbreak that stretches back to the end of 2025 has now spread to at least 789 total people, which surpasses the West Texas outbreak of early 2025 that kicked off the latest U.S. measles revival tour, and led to the deaths of two young girls. This South Carolina outbreak is by no means slowing down; there have been another 89 cases at least confirmed in the last week, and more than 500 people are in 21-day quarantines.
During a media briefing this week, South Carolina state epidemiologist Dr. Linda Bell more or less admitted that this thing had completely gotten away from them, and that it was only getting worse: “We did not anticipate that South Carolina case counts in a matter of only 16 weeks would surpass the total number of cases reached in Texas over the course of 7 months,” Bell said. “It’s disconcerting to consider what our final trajectory will look like for measles in South Carolina.”
Our federal government, meanwhile, was all too happy to say as of last month that the measles outbreak in South Carolina was going to be no big deal. In mid-December, Health and Human Services press secretary Emily Hilliard told Mother Jones that “CDC is not currently concerned that this will develop into a large, long-running outbreak as was seen in Texas earlier this year and whose outbreak has been declared over.”
Could you ask for any more perfect a demonstration of the fact that HHS has absolutely no fucking idea what is going on with the country’s ongoing measles surge, and lacks the urgency necessary to even attempt to deal with it? The likes of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. know full well that mass vaccination is the only thing that can effectively prevent the spread of the measles which is the single most contagious disease known to man. It’s exactly how total measles cases were reduced to numbers as low as 37 for the entirety of 2004–vaccination rates above 95% provide herd immunity that protects all of us. But rather than commit to encouraging mass vaccination, the vaccine-skeptic RFK Jr. tends to talk out of both sides of his mouth at once, recommending vaccines one moment and then talking about “vaccine-injured kids” the next. He has repeatedly offered unproven “treatments” and “medicine” for measles patients–including the two children who died in Texas–without actually prioritizing containing the spread of the once eliminated disease that this kind of vaccine skepticism allowed to return. Kennedy has claimed that we “don’t know what the risk profile is” for the measles vaccine, despite the fact that it has been given to hundreds of millions of Americans since 1963 and studied for decades.
I wrote about how in a December email to me, RFK Jr.’s HHS insisted the current South Carolina measles outbreak wouldn’t get that bad—and how it has since snowballed into the biggest US outbreak since measles was eliminated. www.motherjones.com/politics/202…
— Kiera Butler (@kieraevebutler.bsky.social) Jan 29, 2026 at 10:28 AM
Kennedy’s hand-picked head of the CDC, meanwhile, was installed to give just as few fucks as his boss does about American kids catching a disease that was killing roughly 500 American children per year in the 1950s. Earlier this month, CDC principal deputy director Dr. Ralph Abraham told media that it didn’t matter if the U.S. lost its measles elimination status (which it will), while simultaneously blaming measles on immigrants.
“It’s just the cost of doing business, with our borders being somewhat porous,” said this horrible human being. “We have these communities that choose to be unvaccinated. That’s their personal freedom.”
I focus on children in these discussions, because by and large, they’re the ones who are getting measles, and the ones who have always primarily gotten measles. The disease is so infectious that in a world where it circulates freely, practically everyone will catch measles by the time they’re in their mid-teens, because it spreads so easily. In the modern U.S., meanwhile, older generations overwhelmingly received vaccination when they were children, providing strong protection for life. Of all the cases of measles in 2026, in fact, 96% of them have been in people who are not fully vaccinated with the MMR vaccine. Almost 90% are children under 19 years of age.
What we have is an epidemic, not just of communicable disease, but of parents and guardians who have been led so astray by pseudoscience, culture wars and anti-science propaganda that they’re willing to simply allow their children to endure not just the threat of a potentially deadly or debilitating illness, but also the threat of constant quarantines that disrupt the school calendar and hurt their kids both educationally and socially. We went from measles being a disease that effectively did not exist in the U.S. 20 years ago, to parents proudly allowing their children to catch the disease because a podcaster told them to.
If your child is not vaccinated, and you’re not interested in them experiencing permanent neurological damage, blindness, chronic lung issues or immune deficiency following their measles infection, then please, for the love of god, get them vaccinated. For a whole lot of kids in states like South Carolina and Texas it’s already too late, but that doesn’t mean your child has to become a statistic as well.
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