US loses measles elimination status - and everyone’s blaming one person

As Pennsylvania and Wisconsin each announced a measles-associated death on Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Pan American Health Organization had revoked the country’s elimination status in relation to the disease – according to people familiar with the matter.

Of course, the best prevention against measles is through the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, but US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr has previously cast doubt on vaccine efficacy and safety.

In 2019, when he was chair of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), he wrote to the prime minister of Samoa, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, about the measles outbreak in the country and said it was “critical” that the country’s health ministry “determine, scientifically, if the outbreak was caused by inadequate vaccine coverage or alternatively, by a defective vaccine”.

A year later, CHD published a blog post in which it slammed “the inexcusable suppression of a long-documented link” between measles vaccination and autism, attacking the “dogma” and “aggressive and unnuanced media mantra that MMR ‘does not cause autism’” (it doesn’t).

Then, in 2023, when he was running as a candidate for last year’s presidential election (he later dropped out and backed Donald Trump), he told Fox News presenter Jesse Watters: “I do believe that autism does come from vaccines.”

This changed come a Senate confirmation hearing ahead of his being confirmed health secretary, when he said that he is neither “anti-vaccine or anti-industry”, but rather “pro-safety”.

And then, in March 2025 following the first death from the measles virus due to an outbreak in Texas – the first death from measles in the US in a decade – he penned a piece for Fox News Digital which came with the subheading that the MMR vaccine is “crucial to avoiding potentially deadly disease”.

More recently, US president Donald Trump signed an executive order in August calling for the MMR vaccine to be “administered in three separate single-disease shots” – despite a review of the MMR vaccine by researchers David Ellman (of St George’s Hospital in London) and Dr Helen Bedford (of the Institute of Child Health), published in Archive of Disease in Childhood in 2001, finding that “there is no case for the use of single vaccines”.

The news that America has lost its elimination status has been condemned online, with infectious diseases doctor Neil Stone tweeting: “It took 35 years to achieve. Undone by just 2 years of RFK Jr and MAHA. Absolutely pathetic”:

Colorado senator Michael Bennet branded it “unacceptable” and added: “We spent decades making progress against a deadly but preventable disease, only to see that progress undermined repeatedly by RFK Jr. and Donald Trump’s anti-science rhetoric”:

Vermont senator and former candidate for Democratic presidential nominee Bernie Sanders called it “shameful”:

Washington senator Patty Murray tweeted: “An anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist was put in charge of our public health, and now—after 26 YEARS—America has LOST its measles elimination status”:

Massachusetts senator Ed Markey wrote: “RFK Jr. must be removed now”:

And physician and former US surgeon general Dr Jerome Adams said: “Most babies don’t receive a first measles vaccine until age 1. With measles endemic again, parents can no longer assume grocery stores, airports, churches, or even pediatricians’ offices are safe spaces. The community protection we took for granted is gone, and U.S. moms now must live in fear that their babies will be harmed by a completely preventable disease, while they do every day [sic] tasks”:

The Department of Health and Human Services has been approached by indy100 for comment.

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