Measles and What the Media and Experts Are Not Asking
By Cory Franklin
March 15th, 2026
Most news reports about the current status of measles in the United States are formulaic and predictable. They will tell you that to date in 2026, measles cases have passed 1,000 and are on pace to exceed last year’s total of nearly 2,300. You will be informed that 97% of the cases are in either the unvaccinated or under-vaccinated, with a current South Carolina outbreak accounting for a large percentage of the cases. Many articles warn that the country may lose the measles elimination status it has had since 2000.
All true, and the blame for the deterioration of the public health system is frequently placed on DHHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his daft statements on vaccination. A trenchant quote is usually included from an infectious disease expert along the lines of “the damn house is on fire.”
The facile narrative is that the measles outbreak of 2025-26 is merely the result of vaccination rates falling below a threshold value of 95%. That is accurate as far as it goes. But the 2026 measles story is complicated and many questions remain unaddressed by the boilerplate story.
Some questions journalists and public health experts should be asking:
Measles is generally considered a disease of young children.
Why are a majority of the patients with measles older than expected?
75% of patients are over 5 years old, and in 2025, more patients were over 20 than were under 5. The peak demographic age is between 5 and 19.
If vaccine skepticism was simply the result of RFK Jr.’s blather (and the COVID pandemic), why is the average age of cases around 9? RFK Jr.’s rhetoric and policies may be contributory but they were not causative for an older demographic that was not vaccinated years before RFK took office.
Why now, in the past two years, and why so many countries?
Measles cases in Canada surged in 2025, 25 times higher per capita than in the United States, the highest rate in North America. In 2025, Mexico had six times as many cases per capita as the United States. Cases in the UK and Western Europe dropped in 2025, but in 2024 they were the highest in a generation. The suboptimal international vaccination rates were present before 2024. Why did the explosion in measles cases occur so recently and so abruptly?
That suddenness raises another question:
What role do new arrivals from under-vaccinated countries play in the measles outbreaks hitting developed countries?
The current outbreak in South Carolina, by far the largest in the country, is centered in upstate Spartanburg County. Generally unreported is that many cases in this region can be traced in part to the Ukrainian and Slavic immigrant community there.
The overall vaccination rate in this community is low, which is reflected in the community’s schools and churches – in one charter school the vaccination rate is 20%. The press and to a certain extent the public health system have not devoted sufficient attention to the interplay of the measles outbreak and newer arrivals in America.
Yet another question of near-instant origin:
Why are measles hospitalizations so low?
The 2026 rate of hospitalization for measles in the US is 4%; in 2025 it was 11%. A 2025 CDC estimate was that 20% of all measles cases required hospitalization, so clearly the current figures are much lower than expected.
Some infectious disease experts, including one of the country’s leading vaccine specialists, Dr. Paul Offit, believe this is due to underreporting of hospitalizations. Offit said, “It’s vast underreporting …measles makes you sick.”
Perhaps, but it is unlikely there is enough hospital underreporting to reach the 20% figure and it is just as likely there are disproportionately more unreported measles cases that did not require hospitalization. The low hospitalization figures do not necessarily mean measles is less severe than in the past – it can still be dangerous – but this question, like the others raised here, requires urgent investigation.
The healthcare press and experts hardly distinguished themselves during the COVID pandemic. In the fall of 2020, a reporter for The Atlantic wrote that Iowa could expect to see “nothing less than a tsunami” over the coming holiday season because the state failed to take the precautions the author believed necessary.
There was no tsunami; cases and hospitalizations dropped by 75% between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Rather than concede that the spread of COVID is not well understood, the reporter attributed the drop to emergency measures the state took after her article came out, an assertion without much evidence.
Along those lines, in late 2020 Dr. Atul Gawande, the respected doctor-author, explained the relatively low COVID-19 rates in India when compared with those in the U.S.: “Indians have embraced masks thanks to a combination of factors, including a healthy fear of the virus among the public, a unified voice from authorities, billions of automated phone messages.” By that spring, India was averaging of 400,000 cases a day, one of the highest totals of the pandemic. No explanation by Dr. Gawande.
The simple narrative of measles outbreaks as a result of under-vaccination is true but almost certainly incomplete. Suggesting otherwise is lazy journalism and lazy public health leadership. There is more to the story, much of it unknown, and the public is ill-served when those responsible for asking questions fail to do so.
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Dr. Cory Franklin
Cory Franklin, physician and writer, is a frequent contributor to johnkassnews.com. Director of Medical Intensive Care at Cook County (Illinois) Hospital for 25 years, before retiring he wrote over 80 medical articles, chapters, abstracts, and correspondences in books and professional journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. In 1999, he was awarded the Shubin-Weil Award, one of only fifty people ever honored as a national role model for the practice and teaching of intensive care medicine.
Since retirement, Dr. Franklin has been a contributor to the Chicago Tribune op-ed page. His work has been published in the New York Times, New York Post, Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times and excerpted in the New York Review of Books. Internationally, his work has appeared internationally in Spiked, The Guardian and The Jerusalem Post. For nine years he hosted a weekly audio podcast, Rememberingthepassed, which discusses the obituaries of notable people who have died recently. His 2015 book “Cook County ICU: 30 Years Of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases” was a medical history best-seller. In 2024, he co-authored The COVID Diaries: Anatomy of a Contagion As it Happened.
In 1993, he worked as a technical advisor to Harrison Ford and was a role model for the physician character Ford played in the film, The Fugitive.
Comments 12
Once upon a time: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to be free…”
Currently, “give me your unvaccinated, your measles, COVID, Monkeypox(Mpox), influenzas and other various deadly viruses. “Give me your terrorists, murderers, child rapists, pedophiles, and deadly Jew haters.
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore” invading our fair land with your diseases and godless gutter religion of a child bride rapist who proclaims submit of perish.
God help us.
How sad. The World is going back and we do not seem to care as a World. Too many people came here unvaccinated and now we have measles everywhere. How sad. We grew up playing the yard and fresh air and run and ride our bikes and walked to school no matter the weather. Oh well life is different now.
All true. I was in fourth grade when, in one year I’d come down with red measles, the mumps (both sides), and chicken pox. Whew, what an experience. This was the fifties, and these were typical due to being highly contagious.
The only thing that leaves me curious is having those affect one’s immunity system in a way, that I’ve never had Covid.
Insofar as Jr. is concerned, I learned a very long time ago to rarely trust a do gooder. He’s no exception.
Thanks Doc. Happy Sunday everyone.
How are you feeling John?
As a child of the 70’s, I remember measles were viewed as a death sentence, or even a grave medical emergency. You got a rash, fever, you stayed home for a while, and you went back to school.
We also know that Pharma pumps a ton of money into media, even sponsoring and effectively buying the political coverage and reporting they want. They pay for much of the testing and therefore, essentially pay for the results they want.
Lobbies like Pharma, essentially bribe our government officials both over the table and under the table, and, just like AIPAC and all the other lobbies, Congress does their bidding, even on issues we do not approve of, and sometimes even at our peril.
Kass has written frequently about the combine, Where both parties take the money to screw us. He’s taken the bait from the oligarchs and the true bosses of the world, like the people who fly their private jets to Davos, and become hypnotized by the culture war, which they’ve essentially weaponized and foisted upon us to divide us.
George Soros is not the only vile wealthy person who will even undermine public safety to foster unrest among the population. They meet in the Hamptons with Charlie Kirk and tell him to keep his mouth shut on Israel and stop complaining that we are not following an America First policy. Sleepy Joe and Blinken would go on TV and wring their hands occasionally abut the carnage in Gaza, but they essentially paid for it, with our money, while we have people sleeping on the street, our bridges are crumbling, and our pubic safety is, as Trump would say, “Not Good”.
Anyway, our government lets corporate America poison us, sell us unsafe cars looked the Corvair, pollute the air and water. I think the Green New Scam was to distract is from clean air and water.
Then there’s Epstein. The media is managing the Epstein situation for the government. Epstein was laundering money and blackmailing public officials, celebrities, media, and at least some of it was at the behest of a foreign nation. It seems that after MeToo, and the exposure of the Catholic Church scandal, and the known trafficking of children that our government is complicit in at the border, we are desensitized and anesthetized about rape, child molestation, degradation of young women.
If my team does it, it’s okay. If they hire Alan Dershowitz, and he organized intimidation of accusers, witnesses, prosecutors, media, and the case becomes pleaded down to a misdemeanor, and Epstein essentially gets house arrest. When he’s sprung, celebrities, bankers, oligarchs, politicians come to his house for lavish parties. He had an office at Harvard and no college degree!
Pharma wants you to be sick, scared, and on a lifetime subscription of pills, shots, serums. They don’t tell you to lose weight, exercise, watch salt intake, get outside, forge relationships with family, friends, coworkers. In fact, they want you at home, eating processed foods, bagging away on your laptop and railing about TRUMP, KAMALA, anything except the fact that the super wealthy, the corporations and the government officials who work for them, are poisoning us and getting rich off of it.
They closed schools, parks, and beaches even though the death rate from Covid for kids was very low. The scare campaign for Covid was so good, that pediatricians are still pushing the Covid shot and I still see people wearing masks driving in their cars, ALONE.
But let’s not talk about stopping any of the financial chicanery that is robbing us blind. We can’t have public financing of campaigns. The oligarchs bought Citizens United. We can’t have term limits, who will keep arguing for endless war, and prevent immigration reform and improve health care access for our poor and rural populations?
It’s all a hustle. It’s all carried out by the Combine, here and in DC, they work for their donors and not for us. Rand Paul and Thomas Massie should be heroes, instead, they are Whacky, Unamerican, Phobes, ists, and ites.
While some of you are cheering on ICE, you ignore that there has been no comprehensive Immigration bill that states who cam come here, for what reasons, how long they can stay, and how they can eventually become citizens if that is something we want.
They never ask us. They don’t care about us. Just keep sending these losers money and go to their rallies and vote in these performative elections.
Ted Dabrowski is going to lose, even though he’s, by far, the best candidate. I might disagree on some social issues, but with the financial mess and the character he apparently has, he’s the man for the job. Ditto Paul Vallas. Not a perfect guy by any means, but he has the expertise and the sharp elbows needed to get into the city budget and work to make it structurally sound.
The media will never let that happen. They’ve been bought off too. Kass has first hand knowledge of this, but as I said, it’s far bigger than the culture war. The swells are running psychological ops on us and will weaponize culture, even God to do it.
I’m supposed to not trust Arabs. I’m supposed to hate them. They are Amalek. Just remember that as we slaughter them in Jesus name.
A little nasty, I know, but just having a little fun here. Two columns for the price of 1!
Until the 1890s or so physical limitations limited immigration. It was difficult to walk to a port, sailing ships usually held only a few dozen passengers, and the crossing took 2-3 months one way. Steel-hulled steamships could cross in 2-3 weeks with hundreds of passengers and from 1890-1920s immigration exploded so that by 1924 about 14% of the US population was foreign born. That’s the year the first quotas were enacted.
It was felt that there were too many immigrants to be assimilated and, unspoken in textbooks, there was great concern about diseases [as well as prejudice against non A/S Protestants]. It was estimated that in the 1920s 10% of adults had an STD, mostly foreign bourne. By the mid 1930s a blood test prior to marriage became law in most states; it still is today.
We now have a foreign-born population of 15-16%, too many millions of whom entered illegally and unvetted, and diseases are becoming an issue [as well as violence, crime, terrorism, illegal voting, etc., etc.] While the MSM’s Orange-man/MAGA/Republican = evil narrative focuses on the Trump Administrations actions; it’s nice to see a clear and empiric analysis here. Thank you Dr Franklin!
I’m with you. We as citizens need to ask questions that strive to understand root causes and then have the commitment to act accordingly to problem solve root causes. But I also don’t find it rational to expect the wider population to be responsible citizens and think critically, instead of reflexively to the simple slop they are spoon fed by politicians and their associated media outlets. If we were to put effort into critical thinking as part of responsible citizenship, I think we will find more in common with our fellow Americans than the simple, partisan, and politician simple slop tells us.
(note: “simple slop” above could also be non-political self-serving people writing sensational or pandering slop to garner eyeballs for advertising $$$)
What happens when the education children receive does not teach critical/rational thinking, but instead to respobd to emotion? We have a crisis in thinking driven by pior education in our land, and also globally.
Thanks Doc. Main take-away: incomplete, non-objective reporting by our biased “journalists”. Morrow, Sevareid, Cronkite, Huntley, Brinkley continue to do cartwheels.
Journalism students are infused with critical theory Marxist indoctrination to the exclusion of developing critical inquiry skills.
I know zilch about medicine or infectious diseases, but I had back problems when young and more recently gastrointestinal problems. I learned early to get at least one 2nd opinion, that doctors are human beings that are doing their best. Today’s journalists don’t do that. They want government mandates, then validate it with the catchy phrase “experts say”. Yeah, well, easy to cherry pick an expert.