There’s a deadly measles outbreak raging in west Texas, and it’s being fueled, at least in part, by anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.
The Texas Department of Health and Human Services announced two cases of measles in unvaccinated children on January 23. Now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that, as of March 7, there are 208 cases related to the Texas outbreak, which has also spread into New Mexico. As a result, one child has died and another death is under investigation. This outbreak marks the first measles death in the U.S. in a decade. Nearly all of the people who have the measles in this Texas outbreak are unvaccinated or their vaccination status is unknown.
According to KFF research published in November, 2024, childhood vaccination rates in the U.S. have been falling over the last few years, which “appear[s] to be related to increasing vaccine hesitancy, fueled in part by vaccine misinformation” after the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, 93% of U.S. kindergarteners are fully vaccinated against the measles, according to the New York Times — falling below the 95% needed for herd immunity. And in some places, like spots in Texas, fewer than 50% are protected against measles.
While the source of the current outbreak is unknown, Dr. Jennifer Shuford, head of the Texas Department of State Health Services, told the state’s House Committee on Public Health that decreasing trust in vaccines is part of the problem.
“At 95%, we have what’s called herd immunity. We know when those vaccine levels get lower than 95% that there’s enough unprotected people together to cause an outbreak,” she said, according to the Texas Tribune. “There’s been some decreased interest or decrease in trust in vaccines and that’s caused a decrease in vaccination rates.”
But what exactly is behind that distrust, particularly in the measles vaccine? Here’s how the fully debunked and false conspiracy theories about the measles vaccine came to be.
It started with a study that wrongly linked the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine with autism.
In 1998, Andrew Wakefield — an anti-vaccine activist and former doctor who has now been banned from practice in the UK, his home country — and 12 coauthors published a paper that falsely concluded that “possible environmental triggers” (i.e. the vaccine) were associated with the onset of both" chronic enterocolitis and developmental regression. Twelve years after publishing the controversial study that spurred countless parents around the world to abstain from the MMR vaccine, medical journal The Lancet retracted the paper, finding it to be “incorrect.” Britain’s General Medical Council, which registers and regulates doctors in the U.K., ruled that Wakefield acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” during his research and with “callous disregard” for the children involved in his study.
Though the study has now been disproven — there is no link between the MMR vaccine and autism — the damage had already been done.
According to a report in TIME from 2010, “Vaccination rates among toddlers [in the UK] plummeted from over 90% in the mid-1990s to below 70% in some places by 2003. Following this drop, Britain saw an increase in measles cases at a time when the disease had been all but eradicated in many developed countries. In 1998, there were just 56 cases of the disease in England and Wales; by 2008 there were 1,370.” In the U.S., research found that vaccine skepticism increased because of Wakefield’s paper,
Per the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, the MMR vaccine is highly effective in preventing measles, helping to protect the child who is vaccinated, as well as “those unable to be vaccinated who are most vulnerable to serious disease such as immunocompromised patients and infants too young to be vaccinated.” The NFID is clear in its messaging, that “the most important thing parents and others can do to help protect their families and communities from measles is to make sure that everyone who can be vaccinated is vaccinated against measles.” And, MMR vaccination rates across the U.S. have been and continue to be fairly high — though often falling short of the 95% threshold.
To this day, many parent advocacy groups continue to defend Wakefield, despite the retraction of the critically flawed study, and that no large study has ever replicated his findings. Generation Rescue, a group founded by actors Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey rose in the wake of this study, dominating the public conversation around autism, while offering debunked and potentially harmful methods to “treat” autism. At one point, Generation Rescue’s board members included figures like Katie Wright, daughter of Bob and Suzanne Wright, the founders of influential and controversial advocacy group, Autism Speaks.
While MMR vaccination rates have slightly fluctuated over the years, the COVID-19 pandemic breathed new life into vaccine hesitancy and skepticism, prompting another drop in the number of children getting their MMR vaccines.
The Guardian reports that “influencers who gained large followings during the pandemic – including those at the forefront of sowing doubt about the COVID vaccines – appear to have refocused some attention on MMR.” An increasingly politicized topic, misinformation and conflicting messaging continues to about in current mass communication.
As recently as March 2025, Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who has been criticized for his purported connection to the 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 — outlined a strategy for containing the measles outbreak in West Texas in a wide ranging interview with Fox News, largely drawing on fringe theories about prevention and treatment. Despite extensive research to the contrary, he also suggested vaccination injuries were more common than currently known. Bizarrely, the known anti-vax secretary simultaneously called for vaccinations in the affected community.
Conflicting messaging surrounding MMR vaccine conspiracy theories particularly targets parents on social media. Parents are especially vulnerable — they may be concerned about protecting their child from a vaccine that they see as potentially harmful, or they may be searching for a reason their child was diagnosed with autism. But, autism is not caused by vaccines, and there is no one known cause or reason for it.
One study from Texas A&M School of Public Health researchers set out to identify reasons why anti-vaccine attitudes persist among parents. “Our research suggests that anti-vaccine attitudes have deeply grounded psychological origins, which may be quite difficult to change,” author Timothy Callaghan, PhD, said in an article about the study. Their report noted that a crucial challenge for medical professionals was how to communicate effectively to change the minds of those with more conspiratorial thinking, suggesting that “efforts to encourage childhood vaccination may be more successful if we avoid making mention of scientific studies, which parents might see as motivated by ulterior motives, or tying information to health departments (which these parents might find untrustworthy).”
At once, in part because of conflicting messaging, fact and evidence-based communication might hold less weight for worried parents, considering the emotional weight of issues regarding children’s health in general. One study also suggests that Dunning-Kruger effects (in which people overestimate their knowledge on a certain subject), can also help explain public opposition to vaccination policies. Further, the study suggests that this overconfidence “is associated with opposition to mandatory vaccination policy” and “is also associated with increased support for the role that non-experts (e.g., celebrities) play in the policymaking process.”
Vaccines have “saved more human lives than any other medical invention in history,” according to the World Health Organization, but these unfounded theories continue to prevent vaccines from protecting some vulnerable groups. In the face of a measles outbreak, however, some people seem to change their thinking. Texas station KHOU reports that demand for the measles vaccine has “soared” in the state in recent weeks.
