Even The Trump Admin Seems Concerned The U.S. Could Lose Its Measles Elimination Status

The Trump administration appears to be planning to fight to keep its measles elimination status, even as it increasingly spreads misinformation and skepticism about life-saving vaccines.

To lose its elimination status, a country must have continuous transmission of measles for 12 straight months. Public health experts say the U.S. hit that grim milestone on Tuesday — ironically, exactly one year after Donald Trump, who has put anti-science and anti-vaccine figures in charge of public health, was inaugurated for his second term.

The Trump administration has claimed that it shouldn’t lose its status because there are multiple different measles outbreaks across the country, and that there isn’t enough proof the outbreaks are all connected.

“There is currently no epidemiological evidence linking the Texas, Arizona/Utah, or Spartanburg, [South Carolina,] outbreaks as one continuous chain of transmission,” Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill posted on X in December.

“Measles elimination status depends on evidence of continuous transmission for 12 months,” an HHS spokesperson told HuffPost in a statement. “Based on current data, the United States has not met that threshold.”

The Pan-American Health Organization, part of the World Health Organization, has invited the U.S. and Mexico, which is also in the middle of an ongoing outbreak, to a meeting in April. The governments will be able to provide reports and data about their outbreaks, and PAHO will decide whether the U.S. should lose its elimination status, which it has had for 25 years.

Public health experts don’t believe the U.S. will be able to prove that the outbreaks are unrelated to each other.

“I think it will be hard to demonstrate,” Bill Moss, a public health professor and executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins University, told HuffPost. “I don’t think it’ll be successful because there’s been a lot of virus transmission across North America.” (Canada lost its elimination status in November.)

Measles, characterized by severe rash and high fever, is highly contagious and can be deadly. There is no cure, and receiving the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine that was developed in 1963 is the best way to protect against the disease. Before the MMR vaccine was widely available, measles killed an estimated 2 million around the world each year.

The ongoing measles outbreak in the U.S., which started in Texas, has infected more than 2,000 people in nearly every state over the last year. Two unvaccinated children died in Texas, as did an unvaccinated adult in New Mexico. More than 600 people have been infected in South Carolina, and that number continues to grow.

The vast majority of the people infected with measles are unvaccinated children or those whose vaccine status is unknown.

Losing elimination status wouldn’t impact the everyday lives of Americans, Moss said.

“But,” he noted, “it’s an embarrassment after having achieved and maintained elimination for 25 years.”

Even as it seems to recognize that the U.S. should try to keep its measles elimination status, the federal government does not appear to be making much of an effort to stop transmission of the disease.

“It’s just the cost of doing business, with our borders being somewhat porous [and] global and international travel,” Ralph Abraham, the principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told STAT News on Tuesday when asked about the possibility of losing the elimination status.

“We don’t have a great shot of reversing this trend if we don’t have a trusted public health authority,” Rachael Piltch-Loeb, assistant professor at CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, told HuffPost.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was one of the country’s most notable sources of vaccine misinformation before Trump tapped him to be chief public health official.

Kennedy founded the Children’s Health Defense, a prominent anti-vaccine group that promotes misinformation and widely debunked science, and ran it until 2023. Kennedy also campaigned against the measles vaccine in Samoa in 2019. The subsequent outbreak left 83 people, the majority of them children under 5 years old, dead.

Kennedy has falsely claimed that vaccines are linked to autism and called the COVID-19 vaccine the “deadliest” vaccine ever created.

Kennedy insisted that he was not anti-vaccine at his Senate confirmation hearing last year, but his actions have contradicted that claim.

“In the early days of the [measles] outbreak, HHS was talking about treatments, many unproven, and there was a muted endorsement of the measles vaccine,” Moss said. “I don’t think we saw the response we could have seen.” Kennedy wrote an op-ed for Fox News about the measles outbreak last year that called the measles vaccines a “personal choice” instead of a critical public health tool.

He also promoted unproven remedies for measles at the start of the outbreak, including vitamin A, which reportedly led to kidney damage in children.

“Now that we’re having these [measles] outbreaks, we are not seeing anyone who is doing the work of long-term trust-building in that vaccine,” Piltch-Loeb said.

There have long been insular communities who do not get vaccinated for religious or cultural reasons, and many outbreaks have historically begun in those communities.

But over the last 10 years, vaccination rates among children began to fall. The decrease in vaccine uptake has been fueled by a decline in trust of public health institutions and a politicization of school vaccine requirements, which Republicans and anti-vaccine influencers like Kennedy helped accelerate.

“This has been a problem long in the making,” Moss said.

Kennedy is also causing chaos in the agencies tasked with monitoring diseases like measles. After he fired Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she alleged that her termination was because she refused to sign off on Kennedy’s anti-vax policies. Five senior officials at the CDC resigned, citing similar reasons.

Kennedy also replaced members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the group that sets vaccine guidelines for states and health professionals, with his own handpicked anti-vaxxers.

While measles continues to spread, instead of promoting vaccines, Kennedy has led the charge in making changes to childhood vaccine requirements, including changing the recommendation that all children, healthy or not, get immunized against hepatitis B.

Earlier this month, HHS unveiled the new recommendations for childhood vaccines, whittling the list down from 18 to 11. The MMR vaccine is still on the list of recommendations — but experts worry the change will propagate more confusion and skepticism around immunizations.

It’s a complete departure from a robust vaccination campaign, which is what the U.S. would need in order to curb transmission and reverse the trend of spiking cases. But that effort is unlikely to come from Kennedy.

“I don’t have high hopes given all that we’ve seen come out of this administration, particularly at HHS,” Moss said.