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With more than 4,400 measles cases in the United States this year, double the number in 2025, public health authorities are desperate to persuade more people to take the virus seriously. But current attempts to drive home that message are being rejected by a sizable and growing part of the population. In more than 1,600 counties around the country, measles vaccination rates dropped from 2017 to 2024.
Even modest declines in vaccine coverage can enable major outbreaks because of how contagious the virus is. As a result, some experts in health communication believe the time has come to reconsider the way government agencies communicate to the public about the virus. Yes, measles can be deadly, they say, but counterintuitively, health officials would have more success if their messaging clearly confirmed what many parents already know: Most children will survive.
“Public health agencies and experts should say forthrightly that for most healthy children measles is an unpleasant, self-limited illness from which they recover completely,” Peter Sandman, a retired risk communication expert formerly at Rutgers University, said in an email. “It has to be said repeatedly and emphatically.” Public health experts STAT spoke to emphasized that there are many downstream health issues that could befall children who are infected with measles, and that vaccines are crucial and safer than trying to build immunity through exposure to the disease. But saying most children recover could ultimately build trust.
“If you acknowledge that most kids are fine, you earn the credibility to explain why ‘most’ isn’t good enough when a safe, effective alternative exists,” Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago, wrote in an email. Rarely does that acknowledgement come from public health officials. Instead, they usually emphasize the potential harms of the virus.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s official measles infographics warn in bold block letters that measles “isn’t just a little rash.” When Utah was hit with hundreds of cases earlier this year, the state epidemiologist issued an open letter telling stories of adults with fevers of 109 degrees and mothers so weak they couldn’t breastfeed. Pro-vaccine nonprofits have published accounts of life with measles before the vaccine was developed to show how harmful the virus can be. There’s no reason to doubt the veracity of these statements.
Pre-vaccine, roughly 48,000 hospitalizations and 500 deaths per year in the U.S. were attributed to the measles. But vaccine skeptics have seized on public health messages that focus on frightening accounts and statistics, rather than the much more numerous children who recover. When Gov.
Josh Shapiro (D) of Pennsylvania announced the first two measles-related deaths in his state earlier this year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accused him of “the weaponization of infectious disease fears for political gain.” Public health officials bristle at any suggestion they have engaged in fearmongering, arguing that widely publicizing deaths from measles is justified, given how rare and preventable they are. It’s vaccine critics, they say, who have made unfounded claims about the risks of shots.
Nevertheless, the message that fears of a measles resurgence are exaggerated appears to be resonating. A 2025 survey from KFF found that more than half of parents were either “not too worried” or “not at all worried” by measles, despite cases spiking around the country. The reality is that in the past, measles was often characterized as a routine illness.
Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization previously headed by Kennedy, points out in its anti-vaccine guide for parents that Alexander Langmuir, chief epidemiologist for the CDC in the 1950s and ’60s, acknowledged publicly that measles was “a self-limiting infection of short duration, moderate severity, and low fatality.” Even doctors openly debated in the 1960s whether the disease was serious enough to warrant mass vaccination. In the late 1960s, the idea of children getting measles was routine enough that it was a punch line on “The Brady Bunch.” Vaccine skeptics know this history. The clip of the Brady Bunch children celebrating measles so they could stay home from school has been shared on social media so many times that the actress who played Marcia Brady went on NPR in 2019 to support vaccination.
Public health experts said the fact that measles was accepted as routine in the 1960s doesn’t mean it should be accepted now. “Back in the first half of the 20th century measles was less of a big deal because people were encountering things like scarlet fever and typhoid fever,” said Elena Conis, a historian of science at the University of California, Berkeley. Still, earlier this year, when Pennsylvania proposed new regulations meant to help the state track infectious diseases, some residents pushed back.
One 68-year-old commented on the state’s online portal, “I and all of my siblings have had measles and we all survived. Enough with the BS scare tactics.” “When I was a child, everyone in my school and my siblings had the measles. School was never closed and we did not have a measles vaccine.
Wow, we all survived!” wrote another. While some might hear an acknowledgement of this history as a reason not to vaccinate, downplaying it gives anti-vaccine groups an opening to claim a cover-up, Sandman argued. That’s exactly what anti-vaccine groups have done.
In its anti-vaccine guide, Children’s Health Defense lists “thirty-five secrets the government and the media aren’t telling you about measles.” The first four center around measles’ past and the small chance of complications. The first step toward a more balanced communication strategy may require public health groups to focus on the most common complications of measles rather than the most severe. A child infected with measles typically runs a high fever for several days, alongside a cough, runny nose, and watery eyes, forcing parents to care for a sick, upset child.
“We as vaccine and disease communicators often do talk about the worst case,” said Patsy Stinchfield, executive director of the Measles Collaborative, a pro-vaccine advocacy coalition. “I think we have to move more towards just an average case of measles is extremely miserable.” Some groups have also emphasized that public health officials should lead not with conversations about an individual child’s risk or potential benefit from vaccines, but rather the vaccines’ impact on society overall. While most healthy children recover from measles, the virus can be much more dangerous for children too young to be vaccinated or people with compromised immune systems.
In a survey of more than 9,000 people across the United States, FrameWorks, a nonprofit that studies people’s perceptions of social issues, found that framing vaccines as benefiting the common good “marginally increases” people’s beliefs in the benefits of vaccines. Public health officials don’t have to abandon risk warnings altogether, some experts argue. “There is no need to portray every infection as a catastrophe to justify prevention, and no need to downplay the severity of the disease to avoid fearmongering,” Anat Gesser-Edelsburg , the founding director of the Health and Risk Communication Lab at the University of Haifa in Israel, told STAT in an email.
In other words, presenting the actual risks — without sensationalism — is prudent. According to the CDC, between 1 and 3 of every 1,000 people infected with measles will die. “Those numbers do the persuading on their own, with no dramatics needed,” Wallace told STAT.
Addressing the public perceptions of measles in the 1960s would allow public health groups to explain how much more medical experts know about the disease now, Wallace said. A 2019 study found that a sizable portion of children infected with measles experienced “immune amnesia,” the loss of a substantial portion of their antibodies against other infectious diseases. “It’s new information, and it reframes the nostalgia,” she added.
The simplest message, however, may be one first honed by the CDC sixty years ago. Langmuir, the 1960s CDC official, did, in fact, write in 1962 that measles is a “self-limiting infection of short duration, moderate severity, and low fatality.” But he added that there was little reason not to eliminate a disease that could be prevented with an effective vaccine. “In the United States measles is a disease whose importance is not to be measured by total days disability or number of deaths,” Langmuir wrote, “but rather by human values and by the fact that tools are becoming available which promise effective control and early eradication.” STAT’s coverage of trust in science and public health is supported by the Dana Foundation, Greenwall Foundation, John Templeton Foundation, and Boston Foundation.
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Source: STAT
