As US Nears Losing Measles Elimination Status, Children Under 1 Are Most Vulnerable

The United States stands on the brink of losing its measles-elimination status for the first time in 26 years, and nowhere are the stakes higher than among the country’s youngest children. Babies under 12 months old — too young to receive the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine under standard guidelines — are almost entirely dependent on the immunity of those around them for protection. As vaccination rates slip and outbreaks multiply, that protection is eroding.An international panel convened by the Pan American Health Organization is expected to announce on November 17 whether the United States has officially lost its elimination status, a designation it has held since 2000. Analysis of publicly available genetic data has already identified multiple chains of measles transmission that have persisted for more than a year, the threshold used to determine whether the virus is circulating endemically rather than arriving through isolated travel cases, the New York Times reported.Nearly 5,200 measles cases have been reported this year, far surpassing the roughly 2,300 recorded in all of 2025. Eight deaths have been linked to measles in 2026 alone — more than the combined total from 2000 through 2024 — and none of the victims had been vaccinated. Four of the eight were infants too young for the shot.“Measles is very contagious; it spreads very easily,” evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center who helps oversee the genetic database Nextstrain, J.T. McCrone, told The Times. “We have a lot of connected communities in the U.S., and so you can hop from population to population and maintain a transmission chain.”That contagiousness is precisely why infants are so exposed. Herd immunity — the principle that a sufficiently vaccinated population can block a virus from spreading — requires roughly 95 percent community-wide coverage to protect those who cannot be vaccinated themselves. National MMR vaccination rates among kindergartners dropped to 92.4 percent in the 2025-26 school year, down from 95.2 percent in 2019-20, leaving close to 300,000 incoming kindergartners unprotected and, by extension, leaving infants in their communities more exposed to exposure at home, in waiting rooms, and in public spaces, the Associated Press reported.“Babies become sitting ducks,” Dr. Deborah Greenhouse, a Columbia, South Carolina, pediatrician who treated patients during the state’s recent outbreak, told the AP. “The burden is on all of us to protect all of us.”Federal officials maintain that their response will not change even if elimination status is lost. “Let’s say we did lose our measles elimination status. We’re going to be doing the same exact thing that we’ve been doing today, which is working with the states,” CDC Director Dr. Erica Schwartz told Reuters, adding that the agency’s focus remains on “emphasizing, reemphasizing that the number one way to prevent measles is the MMR vaccine.”But with vaccine hesitancy rising and exemptions easier to obtain in many states, doctors warn that the communities least protected are often the ones least equipped to shield their most vulnerable members. As Dr. Greenhouse put it, reflecting on falling immunization rates nationwide: “To see that we are actually going backwards is just confounding.”

As US Nears Losing Measles Elimination Status, Children Under 1 Are Most Vulnerable

As US Nears Losing Measles Elimination Status, Children Under 1 Are Most Vulnerable

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