Measles, a highly contagious and viral infection, has skyrocketed in the U.S. due to tumbling vaccination rates as large outbreaks spread across West Texas, eastern New Mexico, and Michigan.
Declared eliminated in 2000 after a year-long national absence of infections, measles cases have now hit a record new high in 2025, with 1,001 confirmed cases across 31 states since late January.
Of those cases, 96 percent were unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status, according to the CDC.
Three people, including two young children, have died. All were unvaccinated.
The Independent spoke to the former New York City chief medical officer, Dr. Tyler Evans, who oversaw the city’s response to the COVID pandemic in 2020, to discuss what to do when a deadly virus starts spreading.
Firstly: people “should be double-checking that they and their children have been vaccinated,” he urged.
Measles is a highly contagious viral infection spread by coughing or sneezing that can develop into a serious illness, such as pneumonia and encephalitis, and can be fatal for unvaccinated people.
Groups most vulnerable to the disease include children under five, pregnant women, and people with weakened immune systems, from leukaemia or HIV.
Symptoms, which appear 7 to 14 days after contact with the virus, include fever, cough, runny nose, watery eyes, white spots around the mouth and flat red spots on the face and body.
One dose of the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, which most people receive as children, is sufficient for most adults.
Two doses of the MMR vaccine are about 97 percent effective at preventing measles, whereas one is roughly 93 percent effective, according to the CDC.
Children are usually given the first dose of MMR vaccine around age one and the second between ages four and six.
“When people are not engaged in primary care or population prevention efforts, that’s when infectious disease outbreaks — which could easily be prevented or mitigated or controlled — scale up to epidemics or pandemics,” said Evans, author of Pandemics, Poverty, and Politics: Decoding the Social and Political Drivers of Pandemics from Plague to COVID-19.
Equally, if one person has it, up to nine out of ten people around them will become infected if unvaccinated.
