Dr. Andrew Carroll, a family physician in Chandler, Arizona, a suburb outside of Phoenix, first arrived there in 2000, the same year the United States declared measles had been eradicated. Now, 25 years later, an outbreak is accelerating a couple hours away from his practice — only the latest in a number of troubling outbreaks across the United States this year as vaccination rates tumble.

Key takeaways

• Doctors say they are frustrated and overwhelmed as vaccine misinformation makes it harder for them to help their patients.
• Part of the problem is, paradoxically, that the success of the measles vaccine has made people less afraid of measles.
• But as the virus comes roaring back, children are going to get sick, end up in the hospital, and may even die. “There will be casualties,” one doctor told Vox.

In 2025, more than 1,900 cases have been diagnosed — the most in more than 30 years. More than 200 Americans, the vast majority of them young children, were hospitalized and three people have died — the first measles deaths in the US in more than a decade. A massive outbreak that began in an insular religious community in west Texas set the tone for the year: As cases grew over the spring, US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. waffled on the value of vaccines while touting unproven treatments like cod liver oil. The Arizona outbreak was likewise seeded in a fundamentalist Mormon community with a history of low vaccination rates.

When I spoke with Carroll shortly before the holidays, he thought back to his training in the 1990s, during the height of the AIDS epidemic. “I watched a lot of people die slowly and agonizingly,” he said. But we’ve made so much progress in both research and public........

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