By Michael Mina
Dr. Mina is an epidemiologist and immunologist who has studied measles.
We used to think of measles outbreaks in the United States as isolated events: short-lived and confined to close-knit communities with low vaccination rates. A flare here, a bubble there. But as those bubbles grow and converge, the United States could be at risk for tens of thousands of cases.
Measles was declared eliminated in this country in 2000. That didn’t mean the virus disappeared. It meant we stopped it from spreading freely. It was a hard-won public health triumph made possible by decades of vaccination. But that protection is now unraveling.
Vaccine skepticism has become increasingly mainstream, amplified by pandemic-era backlash, a torrent of online misinformation and support from the new health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been at the center of vaccine misinformation for over a decade. A growing outbreak in Texas, and cases in over a dozen states, shows how fragile our defenses have become.