Texas Child Is First Confirmed Death in Growing Measles Outbreak

The Washington Post

12:04 JST, February 27, 2025

LUBBOCK, Texas – A child has died of measles here, the first confirmed fatality in Texas’s worst outbreak of the disease in three decades, state health officials said Wednesday.

The unvaccinated school-age child was hospitalized last week, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. The death is the first known U.S. measles fatality since 2015.

Officials have reported 124 cases in Texas, mostly in west Texas, since late January, and nine cases in a neighboring New Mexico county. Nearly 80 percent are children, who are more susceptible to the vaccine-preventable disease.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Katherine Wells, Lubbock’s director of public health. “My heart just goes out to the family. And I hope this will help people reconsider getting children vaccinated.”

Summer Davies, a physician who cared for the child when they were first hospitalized this month at Covenant Children’s Hospital here, said the patient arrived with a high fever and struggled to breathe without assistance.

The child’s respiratory symptoms grew progressively worse, and then heart problems were diagnosed. Several days ago, the child was moved to an intensive care unit and placed on a ventilator before dying Wednesday morning.

The child was otherwise healthy, Davies said. The patient “could have lived a long, happy life, and it is really heartbreaking when it’s something you know you could have prevented or that is preventable and ended in something like this,” said Davies, a pediatric hospitalist.

Davies said she has seen about nine measles patients during the current outbreak. She had never previously encountered the disease.

Hospital officials said they’ve treated about 20 patients – all unvaccinated children. They said they were not prepared for a death so soon into a growing outbreak that began several weeks ago.

“We are now seeing very serious consequences of what happens when we have measles in our community,” said Amy Thompson, the hospital’s chief executive.

While many children recover from measles, some die of pneumonia caused by the virus or a secondary bacterial infection.

Measles can also result in a rare and fatal long-term complication that generally develops seven to 10 years later. In 2015, a 14-year-old Oregon boy died from the complication 13 years after he contracted measles abroad.

Vaccination rates are below average in rural Gaines County, the center of the outbreak, where 80 cases have been reported. The deceased child’s hometown was not released, but the hospital said the child did not live in Lubbock. Many patients in rural areas with limited health-care options have been treated at hospitals in Lubbock, one of the closest large cities.

During President Donald Trump’s White House meeting with Cabinet officials Wednesday, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the country’s most prominent critics of childhood vaccination, said the federal health department is “following the measles epidemic every day.”

Kennedy said he thought there were 124 people who had contracted the disease, mostly in Gaines County, and “mainly, we’re told, in the Mennonite community.” He added: “There are two people who have died, but … we’re watching it, and there are about 20 people hospitalized, mainly for quarantine.”

Lara Anton, a spokeswoman for the state health department, and HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon, said the agency is aware of only one death in the outbreak. She said patients are not being quarantined at hospitals. They are taken there for clinical care, she said.

Kennedy added: “There have been four measles outbreaks this year in this country. Last year, there were 16. So it’s not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year.”

Those comments frustrated public health officials who said Kennedy was downplaying the seriousness of the outbreak.

“That’s exactly the kind of messaging that is detrimental to public health,” said Phil Huang, the top public health official in Dallas County. “I mean, we just had a kid die.”

A measles outbreak is defined as three or more related cases. The tally in Texas in the first two months of the year has eclipsed the annual U.S. case count for each year between 2020 and 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2024, the country had 285 measles cases.

Experts said the data shows an unusually high death rate. “There’s 124 reported cases and a death, and that’s a very high death rate,” said Paul Offit, a pediatric infectious-disease expert at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia who has treated measles cases. Typically, the disease kills about 1 in 1,000 people, he said.

It’s likely there are many more cases of measles that have not yet been identified, Offit said.

Measles was eliminated in the United States in 2000, but outbreaks have been increasing because “a critical percentage of parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children because of the disinformation about vaccines that’s out there,” Offit said.

The CDC recommends children receive two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. One dose is 93 percent effective against measles and two doses is 97 percent effective, the agency says.

Public health officials and experts say the Texas outbreak illustrates the consequences of declining vaccination rates.

In Texas, five of the people who contracted measles were vaccinated; the rest were unvaccinated or their vaccination status was unknown. Eighteen people have been hospitalized.

“During a measles outbreak, about one in five people who get sick will need hospital care and one in 20 will develop pneumonia,” the Texas health agency said in a news release. “Rarely, measles can lead to swelling of the brain and death. It can also cause pregnancy complications, such as premature birth and babies with low birth weight.”

The outbreak in Texas comes as Trump elevates skeptics of vaccines to the government’s highest health posts. Kennedy asserts that the risks of vaccines outweigh the risk of disease.

Kennedy drew criticism for a 2019 trip to Samoa, where he met with activists who were calling for Samoans to skip measles vaccines five months before the island nation experienced a measles outbreak that infected thousands and killed 83.

But during his confirmation hearings, Kennedy said he supports the measles vaccine and would do nothing to discourage people from receiving it.

During his seven terms in the House of Representatives, Dave Weldon, Trump’s nominee to lead the CDC, was a leading proponent of the false claim that vaccines cause autism.