NYT - I Study Measles. I’m Terrified We’re Headed for an Epidemic. (Gift link)

April 2, 2025, 5:04 a.m. ET

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.

Measles is among the most contagious viruses known. A single case can cause dozens more in places where people are unvaccinated. Infants too young for vaccination, immune-compromised people and the elderly are all at risk. Measles isn’t just a fever and rash. It can cause pneumonia, brain inflammation, permanent disability and death. The virus can go dormant in the body only to re-emerge a decade or so after infection and cause rapid and fatal brain tissue deterioration.

It also has a more insidious legacy, one I helped discover. In 2015, I led a team that found that measles can erase the immune system’s protective memory of prior infections. This “immune amnesia,” as it’s called, leaves people vulnerable to viruses and bacteria they were once protected against. In a follow-up study in 2019, we found measles can wipe out up to 70 percent of an individual’s protective immune memory.

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