Measles Cases Are Climbing in the US, Right Along With Religious Exemptions From Vaccination

Measles is no joke. A highly contagious and dangerous disease, it can result in complications, especially in young children. Those complications include pneumonia, lasting brain damage and death. It decimated armies during the Civil War, just as surely as enemy fire. In World War I, over 95,000 cases afflicted the US army. Throughout the early decades of the 20^th century, thousands of fatal measles infections were reported each year, with the severest impact on children.

During the 1950s, an annual average of over half a million measles cases was reported in the US, with nearly 500 deaths. Measles was the default disease. Everybody got it by age 15 (95 percent, to be exact). It was lumped along in the then-popular phrase, “usual childhood diseases.”

Then, in 1963, a measles vaccine was introduced with immediate effect. The number of cases declined drastically over the years until by 1981 the rate was 1.3 per 100,000 population. A 1983 study published by the National Institutes of Health predicted that by the following year, measles “will be eliminated entirely from the country.”

The prediction was wrong.  Measles resurged over the next few years, peaking at 27,808 US cases in 1990.  The following year a new “MMR” vaccine, for measles, mumps and rubella, became broadly available in the Americas and made an instant impact. The number of cases declined to 9,643 in 1991, to 2,126 in 1992 and 312 in 1993. By 2020, just 13 cases of measles were reported in the United States.

Since 2020, however, measles cases have been climbing, with the first death in a decade reported this year in Texas. During the first five months of 2025 alone, 1,046 Americans contracted what was once considered an extinct affliction. What happened?

Well, if vaccination was the most effective weapon against measles, the only factor that could defeat it would be if people stopped getting vaccinated. And that is what happened. Fueled by social media disinformation, doubts and suspicions about medicine in general and vaccines in particular began to spread during the COVID-19 pandemic. And over the ensuing years, more and more people have said “No thank you” in varying tones of voice to vaccines.

The preferred mode is via the religious vaccine exemption, an option available in 43 states and the District of Columbia. One would think, then, that to qualify for the religious exemption, one would have to be religious. 

And that’s where it gets complicated.

To begin with, no major organized religion outright forbids vaccination. Adherents within a religion might cite their interpretation of their faith’s tenets as a basis for opting out of the procedure. Some really are sincere about their faith impacting their vaccination decisions, while others. . .  Well, for example, one Oklahoma pastor increased his congregation by 30,000 souls by means of the simple expedient of offering to sign anyone’s religious exemption form in exchange for their online membership in his church.

In Australia, as another example, the bogus “Church of Conscious Living”—registered not as a church but as a business—attracted many “followers,” its reason for existence simply to serve non-religious people who needed a “religion” to back up their refusal to get vaccinated. As a result of the shenanigan, Australia removed the religious exemption option entirely.

Nebraska anti-vaxxer Allie Bush doesn’t believe one needs to be religious in order to claim a religious exemption. “There’s no specific religion that has to be adhered to in order to utilize the religious exemption … It’s purely a parent’s own decision,” she said. “They just have to go get it notarized in the state of Nebraska.”

She is correct. The state of Nebraska, along with a few other states, has no follow-up on the religiosity of its exemption claimants. Just sign the form—no need to say what religion you’re espousing—and you’re done.

Dorit Reiss, a professor of law at UC Law San Francisco, is dismayed that there’s no legal process in Nebraska to verify that the person isn’t falsifying. “The problem is not so much the language in (Nebraska’s) affidavit, but the fact that there’s not really a follow-up,” Reiss said. “If you say, instead of signing a form, the parent has to write a letter explaining why the vaccine is against their religious beliefs and why they want a religious exemption, then you’ll have something to accept and assess.”

New Mexico does that, requiring parents to write an affirmation of their religious objections. Nevada requires initials indicating the signee understands the risks of contracting and transmitting diseases. So does Wyoming.

Meanwhile, as the religious vaccine exemptions trend upward, so do the measles cases. The MMR vaccine is 97 percent effective at preventing measles after two doses. Exemptions, to date, have not been as effective, no matter the dosage.

The irony in all this is that up until our own enlightened century, religious leaders have often been at the forefront of promoting immunization and prevention among their flock. A thousand years ago, a Buddhist nun ground smallpox scabs into powder and applied them to the nostrils of an uninfected person to promote immunity. It largely worked. In the 20^th century, the Dalai Lama carried on the tradition by supporting polio vaccination campaigns.

In the 18^th century, Massachusetts preacher Cotton Mather was the first individual to inoculate people on a large scale, immunizing himself and his congregation against smallpox. And so it went, in England, in Central America, in Iceland, Sweden and the northwest coast of America through the 19^th century, clergy took responsibility for the vaccination of the local and indigenous people in their area in times of outbreak, sometimes even paying for the vaccines themselves.

In 1816, Quaker physician John C. Lettsom wrote of English preacher and vaccine promoter Rowland Hill, “You have done more good than you imagine; and for everyone you may have saved by your actual operation, you have saved ten by your example; and perhaps, next to [smallpox vaccine pioneer Edward] Jenner, have been the means of saving more lives than any other individual.”

That would be an epitaph any soul would be proud to carry to the Pearly Gates, be they leader or believer.

Photo credits: A young child receives his vaccine by David Mark via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.