EDITORIAL: A dread disease returns as the price of rejecting science

Alarms are sounding over the speed at which America is flying into the future on the wings of artificial intelligence that could outsmart humans and replace or destroy them. That fear is plausible enough to factor into safeguards against technology running amok, but at this stage it is hypothetical. More worrisome is a real-time case of this society speeding not into the future, but back to the more dangerous past.

In 2000, measles was eliminated in the U.S. Six years later, the disease has sickened thousands of people, including hundreds in Wisconsin.

This is not the result of a failure of the health-care system or an outbreak of a new strain of a deadly virus. It is the consequence of a segment of the population turning against one of the most important achievements of medical science in history.

Development of the vaccine that protects against measles saved the world from a disease that killed millions of people each year, most of them children.

Before the vaccine, which was developed by an American medical researcher in a world-changing scientific break-through, was introduced in 1963, an average of 2.6 million people died of measles each year, according to the World Health Organization. In the U.S., there were an estimated 500 measles deaths per year and 48,000 hospitalizations. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared measles eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, when more than 95% of children were protected with the measles vaccine and there was not a single measles case reported in 12 months.

  The return of measles is not a surprise. It was predicted when growing numbers of parents started refusing vaccination for their children. Nor is it surprising that the fall in the vaccination rate has accelerated following the bizarre appointment as secretary of Health and Human Services of a man who for years made a business out of selling fear of vaccines with false claims. Robert F. Kennedy has lived up to expectations.

He has belittled the seriousness of measles, promoted controversial treatments for the incurable disease, fired the scientists on his vaccine advisory panel and weakened federal guidance on vaccination against childhood diseases. The changes in CDC guidance were made official with an executive order signed by President Trump, who repeated a Kennedy trope, saying vaccinating against measles, mumps and rubella at the same time, as is standard procedure, could be “quite lethal.”  

No scientific evidence supports Kennedy’s claims or the president’s reckless comment. Repeated studies have found the vaccines safe and, specifically, not a cause of autism, as anti-vaccination zealots, supported by Kennedy, have claimed. 

Yet, just the mention of the possibility that vaccines could somehow harm their children worries parents, and that’s understandable. The failure of Kennedy’s CDC to issue clear guidance on the vaccination of children nurtures such fears.

That effect is evident in Wisconsin, which has the second lowest vaccination rate in the country, with only Alaska ranking lower. It follows, then, that our state has one of the highest total of measles cases in the U.S. this year—243 as of Oct. 1.

Most measles cases in children are mild, an unpleasant week of two at home with a high fever, coughing and a full-body rash. But not all. According to data compiled by the American Medical Association and other medical organizations, more than 10% of the unvaccinated people who get the virus are hospitalized. Some get pneumonia, others suffer from encephalitis and immune system damage. And some die.

Measles is the most infectious of any known disease. So far in 2026, the virus has spread to just under 4,000 children and a few adults in the U.S. and six deaths have been reported. That is certainly far from an epidemic, but the scattered outbreaks across the country flash a warning of the possibility of widespread suffering and burden on health care services.

American scientists gave the world the gift of a future free of a terrible childhood disease. Now anti-science American government health officials seem bent on taking it away.