Communities around the United States are wrestling with a rising number of measles outbreaks. It will be popular, especially among liberal media, to blame noted vaccine conspiracy theorist and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But the fact is that the public health bureaucracy’s handling of COVID-19 vaccinations has done incredible damage to public confidence in vaccinations.
The U.S. is in the midst of its worst measles outbreak since 2019, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noting 308 cases this year, more in 2 1/2 months than the entirety of 2024. This same thing happened last year, when the U.S. saw more measles cases in the first three months of 2024 than all of 2023. In February, a child in Texas became the first person in the U.S. to die of measles since the 2019 outbreak, which this year is on track to match.
You can see the trend in national vaccination rates. Over 95% of kindergarteners in the 2019-20 school year were vaccinated for measles, the third class in the last four years to be at or above the target for herd immunity (The 2018-19 kindergarten class was just a tick below). The 2020-21 class saw a drop below 94%, the lowest in the past decade. The next two years dropped to and hovered around the 93% line, with the 2023-24 dropping below it. The pattern is similar to the decline in polio and whooping cough vaccinations.
There are roughly 4 million kindergarten students in the U.S., meaning that each percent drop is an additional 40,000 kindergarteners who are unvaccinated. Some states and localities have seen more drastic percentage drops, with Idaho from under 90% vaccinated to under 80%. A total of 39 states are below the 95% herd immunity mark, and just seven states have avoided a decrease in measles vaccination rates compared to before the pandemic. Gaines County, Texas, home of the most recent major measles outbreak, has a kindergarten vaccination rate of 82%.
Going back to 2021, the share of parents who “delayed or skipped some childhood vaccines” has almost doubled from 9% to 17%. The share of people who think that “the risks of childhood vaccines for [the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine] outweigh the benefits” has risen from 10% in 2020 to 18% now. Since 2023, trust in the CDC has dropped 5 points, trust in state and local public health officials dropped 10 points, and trust in the Food and Drug Administration dropped 12 points. We’ll revisit the FDA’s numbers later.
It isn’t hard to see where things went wrong with respect to vaccines during the COVID pandemic. The vaccine mandates imposed on the public did not follow “the science” or any lines of reason. Healthy adults who were not at serious risk from the virus were mandated to get the COVID vaccine in order to keep their jobs. Thousands were fired as a result, including U.S. service members. Pockets of California forced people to get vaccinated if they wanted to go into restaurants, leading to In-N-Out temporarily closing its location in San Francisco.
The vaccine mandates extended to children, ranging from requiring children to be vaccinated to return to school (or placing onerous testing and quarantine restrictions on unvaccinated children) to requiring children to be vaccinated to play sports or go to restaurants. Again, all available evidence indicated that COVID-19 was less dangerous for children than the flu.
Mandates for children and for adults who were not old, obese, or otherwise compromised by the virus were justified by the claim that the vaccine would slow the spread of the virus. Dr. Anthony Fauci told TikTok influencers that they would not have to worry about catching COVID-19 if they were vaccinated, while then-President Joe Biden flatly told the public that “you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
That is ultimately not how the vaccines worked. As my colleague Christopher Tremoglie observed in December 2021, “Fully vaccinated adults are testing positive for COVID-19 at about the same rate as unvaccinated people, regardless of how many booster shots they’ve gotten. And while the vaccines may prevent transmission marginally, insofar as they might help reduce the number of days a person is contagious, there is little evidence that they are doing anything at all to prevent the spread of the omicron variant.”
Back to the FDA, trust in the agency dropped 12 points from 2023 to 2025. This stems from a variety of factors all related to its role in approving vaccines for the public. That includes the FDA rushing the typical process in order to make the vaccine available as soon as possible, which raised questions (fairly or unfairly) about the safety of the vaccine, or continued boosters. That was amplified by the pure partisanship on display during the 2020 elections, in which Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris undermined trust in the FDA’s neutrality by claiming that President Donald Trump was “exerting political pressure on the FDA” to approve the vaccines.
After Biden and Harris won, they then turned around and mandated that people be vaccinated for COVID-19 as a condition of their employment. The FDA was used as a political prop in a process that culminated in Biden’s private sector vaccine mandate through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The FDA also suffered the consequences of state and local health bureaucrats and their war on the unvaccinated as mentioned above.
That the FDA is suffering the biggest trust crisis among major public health institutions shows that the duplicity and heavy-handedness of public health officials on COVID-19 vaccines struck a note with people. After all, the FDA’s only notable role in the pandemic was approving these vaccines, making the agency synonymous with them in the public’s eye. Combine that with the steep drop in trust for state and local health officials who imposed vaccine mandates on people, and you can see the looming resentment and distrust in vaccines that was fostered during the pandemic.
The justified doubts about what the COVID-19 vaccines did and did not do based on public health officials misleading the public have bled into people’s attitudes about other vaccines. The anger toward public health officials who pursued incoherent, excessively strict vaccine policies has created more skepticism toward other vaccination standards. According to Gallup polling in 2024, the percentage of people who think the government should require all parents to have their children vaccinated against contagious diseases such as measles has dropped from 62% in 2019 to a simple majority of just 51%. The percentage who think childhood vaccination is extremely important has dropped from 58% to 40%.
RFK JR. ADVOCATES VACCINATION AS MEASLES OUTBREAK CONTINUES
None of this is to say that these newfound vaccine doubts are a justified reaction. The effectiveness and safety of the measles vaccine and others have been proven over the course of decades. But it is to say that these reactions are a natural result of the public health bureaucracy lighting its credibility on fire in order to manipulate the public into taking its preferred actions during the pandemic. Experts are only worth as much as the trust people are willing to put in them, and experts who abuse that trust risk contaminating the credibility of their field in the eyes of the people they misled.
This is why a reckoning for COVID-19 policies, which the public health bureaucracy has largely avoided, is so necessary. The process of rebuilding this trust, and rebuilding faith in successful vaccines, begins with admissions of wrongdoing and mistakes. Pushing the issue under the carpet and hoping people just come flocking back to “the science” is only turning a blind eye to the damage COVID-19 policies did to public health in this country.