The United States is experiencing its most severe measles outbreak in over 30 years, exposing the consequences of a sustained assault on public health. The rapid rise in cases in South Carolina, following earlier explosive outbreaks in Texas, threatens to end the country’s 25-year status of measles elimination—a milestone achieved in 2000 through universal vaccination.
As of mid-December 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has confirmed 1,912 measles cases nationwide. This surpasses the peak of the 2019 outbreak and represents a staggering 571 percent increase over 2024 totals. While the resurgence is concentrated in areas where vaccination rates have sharply declined, its implications are national: the reestablishment of endemic measles in the United States would represent a historic public health failure.
South Carolina has emerged as the location of a second major wave of transmission in the latter half of 2025, demonstrating how quickly measles spreads once community immunity is breached. By December 12, the state had confirmed 126 cases, overwhelmingly concentrated in Spartanburg County, a region that voted heavily for Donald Trump in the previous election. This political geography reflects the social terrain in which vaccine refusal has been cultivated.
Following the Thanksgiving holiday, the outbreak accelerated sharply. State epidemiologist Dr. Linda Bell described transmission as “concerning” and “accelerating,” with 27 new cases reported between December 5 and December 9, the highest weekly increase to date. A major amplification site was the Way of Truth Church in Inman, which alone accounted for 16 new cases in a single week. Additional exposures occurred through households, schools and healthcare facilities.
As a result, at least 254 individuals were placed under mandatory 21-day quarantine by December 10, with 16 isolated due to confirmed illness. These measures, disruptive and costly, underscore the preventable nature of the outbreak.
At its core, the South Carolina crisis is driven by widening immunity gaps. Measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccination coverage among students fell from 96 percent in 2020 to 93.5 percent in the 2024-2025 school year, below the critical 95 percent threshold required to prevent sustained transmission. Of 111 cases reported through December 9, 105, or 95 percent, occurred in unvaccinated individuals.
Children have borne the brunt of the outbreak. Seventy-five cases, or 60 percent, involved school-aged children between five and 17 years old, highlighting the central role schools play in amplifying transmission when vaccination rates fall. This pattern mirrors what has been observed repeatedly during COVID-19 and seasonal influenza waves, where policy decisions sacrificed children’s health to political expediency.
Despite active transmission, public health efforts to increase vaccination have met stiff resistance. Mobile vaccination clinics deployed by the state administered only a small number of doses, a failure Dr. Bell attributed directly to entrenched vaccine hesitancy. This hesitancy is not simply a matter of individual choice but the product of years of systematic misinformation, right-wing anti-vaccine campaigns and the erosion of trust in public health institutions.
The South Carolina outbreak is part of a broader national emergency. Earlier in 2025, a massive outbreak in under-vaccinated, close-knit communities in West Texas produced 803 cases before spreading to other regions, including a sustained outbreak along the Arizona-Utah border, which recorded 258 cases by early December.
The United States’ measles elimination status now hangs in the balance. Under international criteria, elimination is defined as the absence of continuous transmission for 12 months or longer. The deadline for determining the status of the US is January 20, 2026—exactly one year after the Texas outbreak began.
The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) will determine whether US health authorities can demonstrate that the outbreaks resulted from multiple unrelated importations rather than a single continuous chain of transmission. However, as epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm has bluntly stated, “the house is already on fire,” regardless of the formal designation.
The crisis extends beyond US borders. Canada formally lost its measles elimination status in November 2025 after recording more than 5,162 cases in a prolonged outbreak centered in religious communities with low vaccination rates. This loss triggered the revocation of measles-free status for the entire Americas region. Across the hemisphere, nearly 12,600 cases have been reported in 10 countries, with the overwhelming majority concentrated in Mexico, Canada and the United States.
The human cost has already been severe. Three deaths have been confirmed in the United States—the first measles fatalities since 2015—including two unvaccinated school-aged children in Texas and one unvaccinated adult in New Mexico. More than 214 hospitalizations have occurred nationwide, disproportionately affecting children under five.
Measles is an airborne virus requiring negative-pressure isolation rooms for treatment, placing extraordinary strain on hospitals. Complications are common and severe: pneumonia affects approximately 12.5 percent of hospitalized patients, and the virus causes profound immunosuppression—often termed “immune amnesia”—that leaves survivors vulnerable to other infections for years.
These outbreaks are the predictable outcome of declining vaccination coverage, chronic underfunding of public health infrastructure, and increasingly reactionary and anti-scientific conceptions promoted by the state and the capitalist oligarchy. National MMR coverage among kindergarteners fell to 92.5 percent in the 2024–25 school year, while vaccine exemptions reached a record 3.6 percent.
This erosion has been accelerated by workforce reductions and funding cuts imposed in early 2025, combined with dangerously unscientific federal messaging. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has acknowledged that the MMR vaccine is “the most effective way to prevent measles” while promoting unproven treatments such as Vitamin A and presiding over deep public health cuts.
More broadly, the measles resurgence must be understood in the context of a systematic political assault on vaccination itself. Recent actions by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, including its rollback of universal newborn Hepatitis B vaccination, signal the elimination of evidence-based prevention. The elevation of figures such as Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, Beth Hoeg and Ralph Abraham—who have consistently downplayed infectious disease risks and opposed population-level interventions—reflects a broader shift toward policies that normalize mass illness and death.
The return of measles is especially tragic because it is entirely preventable. The vaccine, developed and improved in the 1960s, is safe, effective and has saved millions of lives globally. What is unfolding is the deliberate assault on science by a social and political system that subordinates public health to ideology, austerity, and authoritarian impulses.
As with COVID-19, the danger lies not solely in the pathogen itself but in the social conditions that allow it to spread unchecked. The resurgence of measles is a warning. Unless the anti-public health trajectory is halted and reversed, measles will not be the last disease to reclaim territory once secured by decades of collective scientific and social progress.
The Trump administration, in its rampage against science, represents a qualitative development, but in its assault on public health, as its assault on social programs and democratic rights, it is acting on behalf of the capitalist oligarchy. And it is building on decades of policy, under both Democrats and Republicans, to systematically dismantle protections against illness. The Biden administration’s “let it rip” policy during the pandemic—ending masking, testing and even basic data reporting—paved the way for the further normalization of mass infection and death.
As David North, international editorial board chairman of the World Socialist Web Site, declared in the announcement of the launch of Socialism AI:
... the working class must not cede the field of technology to the oligarchy. Under the rule of this reactionary social layer, which comprises an infinitesimal fraction of the world’s population, science itself is under siege. The capitalist state is becoming a fortress of every form of backwardness and obscurantism. If present trends persist, it may not be long before vaccines are replaced with leeches and inoculation with bleeding.
The tools to prevent catastrophe exist. The science exists. The resources exist. Indeed, Socialism AI represents the opposite trajectory. It uses the most advanced technologies to arm workers and youth with the knowledge and scientific understanding necessary to fight capitalist exploitation and its consequences. It is a powerful tool for building a global movement to take control of society out of the hands of the oligarchy and place it into the hands of the working class.
What is required is the development of a mass revolutionary movement of the working class, aimed at ending a social order that subordinates life to profit—and building a socialist society that places public health, human need and scientific progress at its foundation.