The Texas Measles Outbreak Has Set a New Record
RFK Jr is still downplaying the measles outbreak as it becomes the single largest outbreak in 35 years.
Many of us have known that this was going to be a record-breaking year for measles. Few knew that it was going to be Texas breaking the records though.
The Texas Measles Outbreak Has Set a New Record
Yet here we are, just four months into a measles outbreak that has:
grown to 663 cases
caused at least 87 hospitalizations
led to two deaths
spread to 26 different counties, 3 states, and one other country
become the largest outbreak in Texas since 1992
And has officially become the single largest measles outbreak in the United States since the endemic spread of measles was eliminated.
Texas breaks the previous records held by Ohio, with 383 cases in 2014, and New York, with 652 cases in 2019.
In reality, this new record goes back further than when the endemic spread of measles was eliminated in 2000.
You have to go all the way back to 1990 to get to the last really big measles outbreaks! That’s when measles epidemics were raging across the United States and dozens of people died.
The provisional total of 27,672 measles cases reported in 1990 is the largest number reported since 1977. Cases were reported from every state except North Dakota; however, 61% of all cases were reported by two states, California (12,479 cases) and Texas (4403 cases).
Current Trends Measles --- United States, 1990
These included outbreaks in:
Chicago — over 1,000 cases
Dallas — 2.331 cases
Los Angeles — 7,514 cases
New York City — 1,108 cases
San Diego — 1,049 cases
Outbreaks that left at least 89 people dead, mostly children.
And since the 1990 outbreak was a temporary blip, you have to go back to the 1970s if you want to see a time when these kinds of outbreaks were routine.
RFK Jr Still Downplaying the Measles Outbreaks
But even as we hit record high levels of measles cases in Texas, that hasn’t gotten RFK Jr to change how he is dealing with the outbreak.
“Every child who gets measles gets a headline,” Kennedy said during the visit alongside Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. “When I was kid, there were 2 million measles cases a year and nobody wrote about them.”
In visit to Texas, RFK Jr. said autism, diabetes deserve more attention than measles
Kennedy is still downplaying the outbreak and pushing misinformation about measles.
For example, he says that no one wrote about measles when he was a kid, in the 1950s, and yet there were regular front page stories in the papers about measles epidemics and measles deaths!
And they even wrote about it when kids died with measles. This story of a 4-year-old boy who died with measles in New Philadelphia, Ohio was on the front page of The Daily Reporter in 1958, when Kennedy was also four.
A death that is now vaccine-preventable if folks actually get vaccinated and protected.
References
Current Trends Measles --- United States, 1990 https://www.cdc.gov/Mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00001999.htm
In visit to Texas, RFK Jr. said autism, diabetes deserve more attention than measles https://www.texastribune.org/2025/04/29/texas-measles-robert-kennedy-autism/