HERD IMMUNITY, PENNSYLVANIA (The Daily Whatever Press) — The United States has confirmed 3,887 cases of measles this year. Freaking Measles. The disease this country officially eliminated in 2000, the same year we survived Y2K and figured the scariest thing about the future would be our dial-up bill.
That’s the CDC’s own count as of October 1. All of 2025, which was already the worst measles year in a generation, topped out around 2,300 cases. We blew past that sometime in late summer and just kept going. This is now the worst year for measles in America since 1991, back when Nevermind was a brand-new record and you could still buy it on cassette at Tower.
It’s fun to lose and to pretend, I guess?
Pennsylvania is on fire
Pennsylvania crossed 1,000 cases this week — 1,004 cases to be specific, with 198 people hospitalized and five dead. It’s the largest single-state outbreak in more than 30 years, the first to hit four digits since New York City in the early ’90s. Lancaster County alone has 391 cases.
Here’s who Pennsylvania has buried: two infants in Lancaster County, an 18-year-old in Mifflin County, a 40-year-old woman in Jefferson County, and, most recently, another unvaccinated Lancaster County resident. Nationally, we’ve logged eight measles-associated deaths in two years. That’s more than in the previous three decades combined.
Two of those dead were babies. BABIES! Let that horror sink in because those babies are the whole fucking point of why we vaccinate and they never stood a chance. Kids don’t get the routine MMR shot until their first birthday — six months at the earliest if they’re unlucky enough to live in an outbreak zone. Until then, a baby’s protection is entirely borrowed from the people around her: her parents, her siblings, her daycare instructor… you get the idea. That baby depends on those around her being vaccinated, because she can’t be. Herd immunity is just the village, rendered in immunology.
And we’re letting the village burn to the goddamn ground because a guy who once told the world a worm ate part of his brain got handed the keys to the Department of Health and Human Services.
The CDC would like a minute to find its calculator
Pennsylvania announced its first two measles deaths on August 25. Governor Josh Shapiro stood up and pinned falling vaccination rates on HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which is roughly like pinning a house fire on the guy holding the gas can, the matches, and a hand-lettered sign that says FIRE IS NATURAL.
And then the CDC — which Kennedy runs, as much as it pains me to type those words— spent weeks counting zero deaths. Zero. Its measles dashboard ran an asterisk where the number should go, explaining that federal statisticians didn’t have any 2026 death records naming measles as the underlying cause.
Pennsylvania kept burying people. The asterisk just stuck around.
About two weeks ago, the CDC finally counted one. Last week, it found a second. Pennsylvania is at five.
My teenagers disclose a failing chemistry grade faster than the Centers for Disease fucking Control reports dead children. You run the agency, Bobby. You own that asterisk. Every day it sat there instead of a number was a day some parent in Lancaster County got told, by omission, that this was fine.
Pediatrician Paul Offit has pointed out that measles normally kills about one person per 1,000 cases, but Pennsylvania’s early numbers ran closer to one per 200 — which, in his read, means the outbreak is a hell of a lot bigger than the official tally. So the number they’re slow-walking is the number that tells you how badly they’re undercounting everything else.
I’m nearly at a loss for words here, people.
But I need to keep typing, because there’s more to this Measles horror.
Don’t look at the report card
The Pan American Health Organization was supposed to meet on April 13 to decide whether the United States has lost its measles-elimination status — the badge you lose when a single chain of the virus spreads inside your borders for a full year.
That meeting got pushed to November. As in, after the midterms.
Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware is investigating why the review landed on the far side of an election, which is a sentence I’d like printed on every “I Voted” sticker in America.
Canada already lost its status last November. Researchers writing in The Lancet this spring said we’re very likely next. And the CDC’s principal deputy director has already shrugged at the whole thing, calling a loss of elimination status the “cost of doing business” globally.
The cost of doing business. Five dead in Pennsylvania, two of them babies.
Fuck your business.
How we got here, in two numbers
Kindergarten MMR coverage was 95.2% in the 2019–2020 school year. It’s 92.4% now. That sounds like a pretty insignificant difference, until you learn the herd needs 95% to hold, and that the gap leaves roughly 280,000 kindergartners unprotected.
Meanwhile, non-medical exemptions more than doubled, from 1.9% to 4%.
Measles doesn’t need much of an opening. Up to nine of every 10 susceptible people exposed will catch it, and the virus can hang in a room for two hours after the sick person has left.
Gen X has seen this episode
If you watched Brady Bunch reruns after school, you might remember ‘Is There a Doctor in the House?,’ the 1969 episode where all six kids get measles and spend it playing Monopoly in their pajamas. Marcia actually says, “If you have to get sick, you sure can’t beat the measles.” In 2019, anti-vaxxers turned that line into memes, videos, and a T-shirt. Actress Maureen McCormick, who played Marcia, had measles as a kid, said it was nothing like the show, and choose to vaccinate her own daughter.
The anti-vax crowd took medical advice from a sitcom; Marcia Brady took it from her damn doctor. BE LIKE REAL MARCIA, people.
We watched it in after-school reruns, laughing, because measles was a sitcom disease to us, a complete fiction. We’d all had the shot. Of course we had. So we never worried about measles.
Anti-vaxxers have spent years passing that episode around as proof that measles is no big deal, and they haven’t let up. I got moving proof earlier today. I was casually scrolling through Facebook when I saw a pal had posted this image with a perfectly reasonable caption: “Fuck DJT, fuck RFK, and fuck antivaxers.”
Yes, yes, and yes. I was so here for that comment—and so spooked by the mid-tone salmon color of my state, Washington.
But this Facebook friends had friends. Awful friends, who started popping off with antivax crap, including a commenter showed up with the whole antivax theology in four sentences:
“Fuck anyone who forces another to take something they don’t want. Free will. We have an immune system for a reason. God did not fuck up.”
Babe, the vaccine is the immune system. That’s the entire trick: it shows your body a wanted poster before the real thing walks through the door. Nothing about God’s handiwork gets overridden; it gets a cheat sheet. And I am as pro-bodily-autonomy as a woman with pinkish hair and a Substack can possibly be, but a baby in Lancaster County too young for the shot doesn’t get free will. Her immune system is whatever the rest of the people around her decided.
Now I’m raising two daughters in a country that un-eliminated a disease, run by a health secretary who’d rather fight about whose numbers count than count the dead. That’s the part that makes me want to throw something very heavy through a window. Or, more specifically, into the skulls of nimrod anti-vaxxer shitbags like this woman, because WE HAD THIS. WE BEAT MEASLES!!! Our parents handed it to us, finished, done, victorious, eliminated from the USA, nothing to see here!!
WE BEAT MEASLES, YOU STUPID FUCKING MORONS.
And these ignorant motherfuckers took our trophy and hucked it to the curb.
The Brady kids were fine by the closing credits. Five Pennsylvanians weren’t, and the CDC is still looking for its calculator. Maybe the brain worm has it?
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Some folks need to take a tour of an old cemetery where they can see the tombstones of babies who died within days/months of being born. It’s heartbreaking. I feel for the kids of these knuckleheads. I have sympathy for the kids, their parents, not so much.
Early in my nursing career, before the vaccines, I cared for babies/children with measles. It's a horrible disease! Even if the child survives, they will likely have hearing, vision problems. Not vaccinating your children is child abuse.