As outbreaks of measles spread throughout the world, anti-vaccine activists aren’t just urging people not to get vaccinated — they’re taking a page from a well-worn playbook, falsely downplaying the dangers from the highly contagious respiratory disease.

“The truth is, measles is not a super severe serious illness when you’re a child,” Mary Holland, president of the country’s best-funded anti-vaccine organization, Children’s Health Defense, said last week on the group’s online morning show. Children’s Health Defense was founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who took a leave from the organization in April to run for president.

Holland, a lawyer, called government responses to recent outbreaks “fearmongering” and “crying wolf.”

“It’s a couple days of spots and then you move on,” she said.

But national health agencies warn the fear of measles is well-founded.

Measles — a disease so contagious it acts as a bellwether for threats from other infectious diseases — is marked by fever, flu-like symptoms and an itchy rash, and sometimes comes with dire complications including pneumonia, seizures and brain damage. For every 1,000 cases of measles, about 200 children may be hospitalized, 50 may get pneumonia, one child may develop brain swelling along with deafness or disability, and between one and three may die.

Despite the availability of an incredibly effective vaccine, the disease is spreading worldwide. The reasons behind the surge are complex. For countries in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, there are issues of access; childhood vaccine campaigns suffered when Covid weakened already-stretched public health systems. Europe, the U.K. and the U.S. experienced similar, if smaller-scale, disruptions to their childhood vaccine programs during Covid. Rising vaccine skepticism plays a smaller but significant part.

Last month, the World Health Organization announced an “alarming” 45-fold increase in measles in Europe from 2022 to 2023, while health officials in the U.K. declared a “national incident” stemming from an outbreak of hundreds of cases in the West Midlands, warning of a likely spread to other regions. U.K. officials attribute the rise to a drop in vaccine uptake.

Across the U.S., state and regional health agencies have been announcing cases of measles in their communities. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an advisory last week for providers to “stay alert” for measles cases, citing 23 confirmed cases since Dec. 1, mostly among unvaccinated children.

Anti-vaccine activists and influencers are unfazed.

Mother and wellness influencers with tens of thousands of followers on Instagram have reacted to the recent outbreaks with posts warning their audience not to buy into the hype. “As the news tries to fear-monger about the measles ‘outbreak,’” one home birth advocate posted, “remember that the vaccine is more dangerous than the actual illness.” (This is false.)

Other mom influencers posted memes tapping into nostalgia for a time when some parents intentionally exposed their young children to measles, mumps and rubella with “parties,” as the diseases were considered serious, but less harmful for young children. These planned contaminations largely ended with the availability of vaccines, which offered the preferable opportunity to avoid the diseases in childhood and beyond.

Before a measles vaccine became available in 1963, the U.S. saw an estimated millions of cases per year, tens of thousands of related hospitalizations, and hundreds of deaths, according to the CDC. At the time, compared to polio and smallpox, measles was considered a milder disease, but riding a wave of success from those immunization efforts, the federal government launched a vaccine push to eradicate measles and by 1969, cases had fallen dramatically.

While pockets of distrust for vaccines have existed as long as vaccines themselves, certain events — most notably the publication of since-discredited research by disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield — supercharged the anti-vaccine movement and have powered the enduring and false belief that vaccines lead to autism and other maladies.

The tactic of minimizing the threat of vaccine-preventable illnesses is nothing new. Anti-vaccine activists in the 1800s dismissed the dangers of smallpox as “senseless panic” ginned up by doctors and health officials. And during Covid — a disease that claimed over 1 million American lives — activists claimed through debunked documentaries and conspiracy-theory-laden books that the vaccines were more dangerous than the disease.

In 2019, as measles surged through the U.S. at a rate not seen in decades, then-President Donald Trump reversed his previously hesitant stance to urge parents to get their children vaccinated. In response, weeks later, the second best-funded anti-vaccine organization, the Informed Consent Action Network, released “Measles for Dumbies,” a video guide for how to “identify, understand and refute mainstream misinformation,” about what Del Bigtree, the group’s executive director and now director of communications for the Kennedy campaign, called “a benign childhood disease.”
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(Not reported above is that about one in ten children/persons who get measles will experience damage resulting in at least partial deafness... for the rest of their life. I remember growing up there was one kid my age in my parent's church who couldn't attend regular schools due to his being mostly deaf as a result of measle. There is also a higher risk of developing SSPE as well.)