This article originally appeared in the Off-Script print issue, in stands November 2025. It has not been updated and some information may be out of date.
Utah is experiencing its largest measles outbreak in decades, according to state health officials. Counties hit the hardest experienced a significant decrease in childhood vaccinations following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Clarissa Keisling, vaccine-preventable disease coordinator for the Utah Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said “we haven’t seen an outbreak this big in decades.”
The spread of measles along Utah and Arizona’s border has more than 100 confirmed cases. The concentration of cases follows a broader nationwide trend of 1,648 confirmed cases nationwide, according to data from the CDC as of Oct. 28, 2025.
Keisling, an epidemiologist, pointed to the high contamination rate for measles as a cause for the outbreak.
“Measles is the most infectious disease that we know about,” she said. “People of any age who have not previously contracted or [not] been vaccinated against measles are extremely likely to contract the disease if they are exposed.”
In August 2025, Axios found that Utah has the second highest rate of vaccine exemption in the country, behind Idaho. Keisling emphasized how the majority of those infected in Utah have not been vaccinated against measles. “Almost all of our cases [in Utah], with the exception of a couple, have been unvaccinated,” she said.
As of fall 2024, 88.6% of kindergartners in Utah were vaccinated with measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccines, per the CDC, which is below the 95% threshold for herd immunity. “Those exemption rates further lowers herd immunity, meaning that not enough people have the immunity to prevent the spread in the event that one person gets infected,” Keisling said.
Vaccine skepticism
A 2022 Axios analysis of Utah immunization data found that vaccine exemptions after 2020 spiked in politically conservative counties.
Nicholas Rupp, spokesperson for the Salt Lake County Health Department, attributed the drop in vaccination to “a distrust of government, and a distrust of authority figures in science and medicine in politics.” He also noted a rise in vaccine skepticism among right-wing communities. “I think folks who consider themselves more conservative may be experiencing that distrust a little bit more,” he said.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services who led the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, campaigned on anti-vaccine stances. Dr. Brian Moench, a retired anesthesiologist, criticized Secretary Kennedy’s approach.
“A person who is that disconnected from scientific information and reality and is so unqualified to be there,” Moench said. “It’s truly tragic and dangerous that he’s in a position of authority to make any kind of decisions about this.”
Axios also reported that President Donald Trump cut nearly $31 million in childhood immunization and vaccination funding in April as part of “broader cancellations of pandemic-era federal public health spending.”
Moench is the president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment (UPHE), the largest civic organization of health care professionals in Utah. He specializes in public health and the environment. Moench referenced Kennedy’s suggestion for treating measles, which included high doses of vitamin-A. “That kind of stuff is absolute witchcraft. There’s absolutely no science to support it whatsoever,” he said.
According to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, vitamin-A does not prevent measles contamination, but vaccines do. “There is some value to the MAHA movement, but you have to be very selective in interpreting that movement,” Moench said. “The chemicals that big agriculture has become dependent upon to raise most of the food that people eat, I think it’s fair to say they’re not safe, the pesticides in particular.”
Moench said vaccine skepticism rooted in medical misinformation deducts from the value of the MAHA movement. Rupp pointed to misinformation as a primary contributor to vaccine skepticism.
“There has been some misinformation and disinformation shared primarily online. But even before the internet was a big thing, the Wakefield study, which has since been debunked, incorrectly tied the MMR to autism. That’s been disproven,” Rupp said. “That was really what started the misinformation about MMR. We’ve been using the MMR since 1963, for generations now, and it’s always been proven very safe and effective.”
Rupp emphasized how the Salt Lake County Health Department aims to decrease vaccine skepticism with transparent scientific information. “We’re here for everybody, regardless of their political orientation,” he said. “We’re here to provide the best information we have, the best scientific advice, and then let individuals choose what’s best for them, and hopefully they will choose what the science shows.”
Treating measles today
Measles has reached its highest level in the U.S. after being declared eliminated in 2000, according to Johns Hopkins. Rupp explained how the former eradication of measles has forced the Salt Lake County Health Department to train some physicians on how to diagnose and treat the illness during former outbreaks.
“We had physicians who’ve been practicing [for] a number of years, and we had to help them learn how to recognize measles symptoms, how to diagnose measles, because in their entire careers, they had never seen a case of measles,” Rupp said. “It wasn’t familiar to them. They didn’t recognize it because vaccines had been so effective, the MMR had been so effective at eradicating it domestically.”
There are no confirmed cases of measles in Salt Lake County in 2025, he said. “Measles is incredibly contagious, and the measles vaccine is very, very effective at preventing measles infection. There’s a direct correlation to lack of vaccination and an increase in measles,” Rupp said. “One dose of the MMR will prevent you [from] getting measles by 93%. The second recommended dose, gets you up to 97%, that’s an extraordinarily effective vaccine.”
He also explained how vaccination decreases the severity of infection if someone contracts measles. “Even in that 3% where someone who’s got both doses but still can catch measles, their illness will be shorter and it will be less severe,” he said.
Rupp said the former eradication of measles has also contributed to anti-vaccine viewpoints. “People nowadays are more likely to say vaccines are less important than in previous years because they haven’t seen or don’t remember the devastating effects of the illnesses that vaccines prevent,” he said.
Utah’s outbreak response
Keisling explained Utah HHS primarily tests wastewater to trace where measles infections occur. “With the ongoing outbreak that’s happening down on the Utah/Arizona border, we know there’s cases down there by conducting statewide wastewater testing,” she said. “If we have a positive sample somewhere where we have not seen a case before, that gives us a running head start [and] we may need to do some targeted work with the local health department in a certain area.”
HHS launched a measles response website following the recent outbreak. “This dashboard has updated case counts and other data graphics that show active statewide surveillance,” she said.
Keisling explained that the site is meant to increase access to transparent, accurate information. “This allows not just our local health partners and health care providers, but also transparency with the public where we’re actively updating our case counts on our public website so people know what the status of measles is in Utah,” she said.
Keisling added the website serves as a central hub for the state’s response efforts. “This web page houses all of our response efforts in one concise place for all of our various response partners, whether that’s our local health departments, health care providers, or just members of the public looking for information.”
As measles cases surge, Utah HHS continues to publish information related to the outbreak online at https://epi.utah.gov/measles-response/.
John Hedberg | Dec 3, 2025 at 11:46 am
The incredibly “right-leaning” (haha) Atlantic Magazine published an article on January 30th, 2022, titled “Race-Based Rationing is Real – And Dangerous”, describing the “expert” CDC-recommended rationing of life-saving COVID medicines based on skin color alone, even among those medically classified at greatest medical risk of death without it.
The Washington Free Beacon published a similar article on May 9th, 2022, titled “Utah Was Warned Racial Rationing of COVID Drugs was Illegal: It Did It Anyway”, describing how these Crimes Against Humanity CDC medicine recommendations were actually instituted here in Utah, despite the fact that similar racial rationing was declared a War Crime against the Nazi’s at Nuremberg 80 years ago, so we know people in academia (like medical “experts” here at the U, for instance, who said nothing) had time to absorb the information.
Medical “experts” said nothing about it when the CDC advocated letting co-morbid seniors simply die for DEI race hatred, even th0ugh medicine was available to save them: race murder.
Like a lot of Utahns, even though I descend from at least 3 Latino countries, I have a full 100% “white” (Swedish, in my case) grandparent. Thousands of us here at the U are like this, like most American families: we’re multi-racial and poly-ethnic, and you can’t tell our heritage simply from looking at our skin tone or listening to our last names. We are the Great American Melting Pot! We breathe our diverse roots every day in this racist-DEI hate culture we’ve somehow inherited despite Dr. King’s rock-solid Judeo-Christian advice that we should judge each other only by the content of our characters, the way a Loving Father looks at each one of us as beloved children.
A member of my own family caught COVID during the Summer of 2021, scored 5 our of 5 on the medical checklist of highest risk of death from COVID if he didn’t receive treatment, and when he went to the ICU to get the treatment he qualified for medically, the ICU doctors tried to deny him monoclonal antibodies, when even they said he was at highest risk of dying if he didn’t receive them. They had the antibodies, and no one else needed them: we asked! They just didn’t want to administer the medicine.
He had to convince the ICU doctors not to let him die, which he eventually did after receiving an extra (and expensive) test to make sure the medicine wouldn’t be wasted on him, AFTER he’d already passed the official medical risk checklist.
The racist-DEI CDC tried to race-murder a member of my family because of how he looked in their eyes, and no other reason.
How would you feel, as a Utah student, if the DEI “health experts” at the U, or the CDC, recommended letting your abuelo simply die just because they didn’t approve of how he looked, even though they had the medicine to save him, and he qualified for that medicine using their own medical checklist?
Again, the reporting out of Student Media on the loss of public trust in public health after the COVID freak show is as (alt-Left?) partisan as it is thoughtless, as if those who run student media with our extorted student funds deliberately wish to hide the real story and its very real roots.
A refund is the least we should ask, don’t you think?🤔☺️
John Hedberg | Dec 2, 2025 at 7:21 pm
Let me ask you a basic question in logic:
All of RFK’s children were fully vaccinated. He testified to this during his confirmation hearing, and not even the children who disagree with him politically contradicted the fact that they were fully vaccinated.
Would someone who is truly “anti-vax” fully vaccinate all of his children? If, therefore, he’s not “anti-vax”, where is the real story hidden inside this typical canned partisan diatribe?
How about the fact that his HHS command team is comprised of world-renowned health experts whose correct diagnoses were incorrectly suppressed as misinformation by the previous Becerra-HHS during the Pandemic. If you want to know why public trust in public health is at an all-time low, and why MAHA was elected by an overwhelming majority, have you thought of doing any story at all about the incompetent mishandling & malfeasance of the public health Pandemic response?
This article is being misrepresented as a “news” piece. Where is the critical thinking? Where are the diverse points of view? Where is the review of evidence in any direction?
The student media office continues to be an embarrassingly partisan misuse of mandatory student funds extorted from a population whose political, philosophical, and cultural diversity is ignored in 90+% of the propaganda being posed as journalism.
Where can we get a refund?☺️💛