# Measles belongs in history books. Instead, under RFK Jr., it's killing kids. | Opinion

## Measles should not be in the news. Yet here we are in 2025, dealing with the spread of an illness that essentially had been eradicated.

, a time when anti-vaccine fanatics (and their enablers in the legislature) were persuading gullible parents not to vaccinate their children, a woman from Sun City West named Carol Lee wrote a letter to the editor of The Arizona Republic that read:

> “I cannot understand  their child.
>
> “In the mid-1960s a measles pandemic caught me. I was a school teacher, pregnant and caught the measles from a student. As a result, my beloved son is deaf and had several heart surgeries before he was 10 years old.
>
> “Don’t risk a child’s life withholding immunizations.”

Ten years later, one of the world’s most uninformed anti-vaccine fanatics, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is the nation’s Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary and, for the first time in 10 years, .

### Measles should only exist in history books

The  the patient was an unvaccinated school-age child. As of Friday, 146 cases of measles have been reported in the state since late January.

Of this, Kennedy said, “. We have measles outbreaks every year.”

Measles is highly contagious.

The risk for any number of terrible outcomes is severe for unvaccinated children and equally bad for the people who could catch the virus from them. People with compromised immune systems (like cancer patients), other children and ‒ as Carol Lee pointed out a decade ago ‒ pregnant women.

It , which we had at one time, to create the protection from viruses that we call “herd immunity.” Conspiracy theories and debunked (but still spread) claims have dropped the vaccination rate below that level.

### How many deaths will convince us about vaccines?

And measles is back.

Before the vaccine was created, millions of Americans were infected each year, , many of them children, and nearly 50,000 per year were hospitalized.

We forget.

We forget that polio killed or paralyzed  before that vaccine was discovered.

We forget, even though it was only a few years ago, that before COVID-19 vaccines were introduced, the disease .

Estimates are that COVID-19  in just the first year the vaccination was available.

There is no vaccine for ignorance, however. Only death seems to convince people that vaccines are valuable.

Now that measles is back, it’s impossible to know how many dead children it will take for the uninformed, or misinformed, to come around.

More than that one in Texas, I’m afraid.

_EJ Montini is a columnist at the Arizona Republic, . Reach him at ._



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