The US has logged 2,295 confirmed measles cases in 2026, pushing this year’s total past the 2,289 cases recorded for all of 2025. It’s the worst single year for the disease since 1991, with more than five months still to go, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
Even so, this year’s count is nowhere near the 1991 outbreak itself, which topped 9,600 cases before routine childhood vaccination all but wiped the disease out domestically. The US declared measles eliminated in 2000.
Three states account for most of this year’s cases. CDC figures put South Carolina at 670, Utah at 518, and Texas at 182. Roughly 146 patients, or about 6% of cases, have needed hospital care, and the outbreak hasn’t produced a single US death this year, a sharp contrast with the three fatalities recorded in 2025.
Officials tie the surge to slipping vaccination rates rather than any change in the virus itself. William Moss, who leads the Johns Hopkins International Vaccine Access Center, said broad immunization has spent decades “keeping measles at bay.” Earlier CDC data this year found the large majority of confirmed patients were unvaccinated or had no documented vaccine history.
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Case counts have climbed steadily since Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic, took over the department. Cases went from 285 in all of 2024 to more than 2,000 in 2025 and past 1,600 within the first three and a half months of 2026, a trajectory lawmakers pressed him on during an April congressional hearing.
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At a separate Senate hearing that same month, Kennedy denied any personal responsibility for the outbreaks, attributing them to rising case counts abroad. “We have done better than any other country controlling the measles outbreak,” he told senators.
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The Pan American Health Organization is due to review whether the US still qualifies as having eliminated measles when it meets in November, alongside a similar review of Mexico’s status.
