This entry previously stated that the World Health Organization revoked the United States' measles elimination status on June 15, 2025. That did not happen. The claim rested on a source URL that does not exist, and it has been corrected here rather than quietly removed.
What did happen is serious on its own terms. In November 2025 the Pan American Health Organization's Regional Verification Commission found that the Region of the Americas had lost its status as free of endemic measles transmission. The country that triggered that finding was Canada, which met the technical criterion of uninterrupted circulation of the same virus genotype and lineage for twelve months or more.
The United States has not lost its own elimination status. PAHO postponed the country-specific review of the United States and Mexico to November 2026, at the Commission's regular annual meeting, with the U.S. analysis period running from the January 20, 2025 outbreak onset date. That review is pending. Public health researchers widely expect the United States to lose the designation it earned in 2000, but as of this writing it has not.
The underlying epidemiology is what makes the review a live question. In 2025 the United States recorded roughly 2,286 confirmed measles cases, the most since 1991, spread across 45 jurisdictions in 48 outbreaks. Three people died: two unvaccinated children in Texas, neither with an underlying condition, and one adult in New Mexico. About 93 percent of cases were in people who were unvaccinated or whose status was unknown, and roughly 11 percent of patients were hospitalized. The largest outbreak, in West Texas, exceeded 760 cases before being declared over in August. The pace continued into 2026: 2,465 cases as of August 6, with no deaths confirmed.
Kindergarten MMR coverage was 92.5 percent for the 2024-25 school year, below the roughly 95 percent needed for herd immunity and down from 95.2 percent in 2019-20. A previous version of this entry gave that figure as 81.4 percent, which is wrong.
One further correction belongs here, because it is the causal link most often drawn. This entry previously said Kennedy “eliminated measles vaccine from CDC recommendations” on February 4, 2025. The Congressional Research Service record of vaccine schedule changes contains no such directive. MMR was never removed from the childhood immunization schedule. What changed, in September 2025, is that the combined MMRV shot lost its preferred status in favor of separate MMR and varicella shots, which is a question of formulation rather than of whether children are vaccinated against measles (see Kennedy Replaced All 17 CDC Vaccine Advisers, and the Panel He Appointed Rewrote the Childhood Schedule and After a Presidential Memo, HHS and CDC Cut the Number of Vaccines Recommended for All Children).
The administration's broader record on vaccine policy is documented across this tracker and does not depend on any of the claims corrected above.