Subject: Here come the MAGA Measles
Just as one large measles outbreak peters out in the United States, another outbreak of the virus has taken off along the border of Utah and Arizona.

The new outbreak began in August and has sickened more than 100 people, making it the second-largest cluster of cases in the country this year. A majority of the cases are in unvaccinated people.

It comes during an already bleak year for the nation’s public health — the number of measles cases hit a 34-year high this summer, largely driven by the so-called “Southwest outbreak,” which grew to more than 880 cases across Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Several epidemiologists agreed that the current scale and spread of cases most closely resembles the large outbreaks of the early 1990s, before nationwide immunization campaigns and school vaccine mandates helped the US declare the virus eliminated.

In the current outbreak, cases have been clustered in Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah — adjoining cities with historical ties to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a polygamist offshoot of the Mormon church. However, local public health officials said the virus had spread beyond members of that religious group into the broader community, where vaccination rates have dropped steeply since the pandemic.

In Mohave County, Arizona — which now has the second-highest case count of 2025, only after the Texas county at the center of the Southwest outbreak — roughly 90 percent of kindergartners were fully vaccinated against measles in the 2019-20 school year.

But by the 2024-25 school year, the vaccination rate had dropped to 78 percent. About 95 percent of a community needs to be vaccinated to stem the spread of measles, which is one of the most contagious known viruses.

Data from Southwest Utah tell a similar story: Vaccination rates dropped nearly eight percentage points over the course of the pandemic to about 78 percent.

Moss said it comes as no surprise that this outbreak has taken root in states with relaxed laws surrounding school vaccine mandates. Both Utah and Arizona allow parents to opt their children out of those requirements for personal, religious, or medical reasons.

In Mohave County, the percentage of kindergartners with personal exemptions nearly doubled from the 2019-20 school year to the 2024-25 school year. Exemption rates in Southwest Utah, the vast majority of which were attributed to personal beliefs, also nearly doubled during that time period.

“We’ve just been holding our breath and waiting for this to happen,” said Jessica Payne, an epidemiologist who leads the immunization program at the Utah Department of Health and Human Services. “Now it has.”

——AP