The measles outbreak that started in Texas this year is likely larger than reported, an official at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”) said on April 15.

Dr. David Sugerman, a senior CDC scientist working on measles, said during a meeting with the agency’s vaccine advisory panel “We do believe that there’s quite a large amount of cases that are not reported.” “In working very closely with our colleagues in Texas, in talking with families, they may mention prior cases that have recovered and never received testing, [and] other families that may have cases and never had sought treatment,” Mr. Sugerman said. “So we do think that there is under-testing and therefore under-diagnosis and under-reporting.”

A measles outbreak started in Texas in Gaines County in January and has since expanded to multiple other jurisdictions, including part of New Mexico. As of April 15, Texas had confirmed 561 cases and New Mexico had confirmed 63 cases.

The majority of patients have been either unvaccinated or have no documented doses of a measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine more than 14 days before the onset of symptoms. Seventeen of the patients had received at least one MMR vaccine dose.

In Gaines County and surrounding areas, vaccination rates have been falling in recent years. Federal and local health officials say. 82% of kindergartners and 90% of seventh graders in Gaines County had received two doses, or a full series, of the vaccine, according to the most recent data available, from 2023 to 2024.

Two people have died from measles in Texas, according to state health officials. Dr. Edwin Jose Asturias said that factoring in the reported number of cases, the case fatality rate would be much higher than is historically known for measles outbreaks.

“I don’t want to think that there is a higher mortality there. Perhaps what’s happening is a huge amount of under-reporting of the cases of measles that are happening in that jurisdiction,” he said.

Per Sugarman’s report to the committee, as of April 10 there had been 712 confirmed cases of measles across 25 states in 2025. This was up from 285 cases in all of 2024. The majority of the cases from 2024 were a part of one of five ongoing outbreaks.

A 2023 paper published by the American Journal of Epidemiology that studied antibody levels found that the antibodies waned by 4.8 percent a year among those who received two doses of the MMR vaccine, compared with 9.7 percent per year after one dose, calling into question the long term effectiveness of the MMR vaccine.  A competing study out of France showed a decrease in effectiveness overtime but by smaller amounts.

“It’s a leaky vaccine, and that problem is always going to be around,” said Kennedy, who recently advised people to take the MMR shot. 

Recently, Kennedy said that Americans who have died with measles have other underlying health conditions that contributed to the death. One of the children who died this year, Kennedy said, had lingering mononucleosis, citing her medical records and his conversations with her parents.

A paper from 2021 highlighted that a set of people who received a measles vaccine had no detectable immunoglobulin G antibodies against measles, calling into question the effectiveness of the vaccine. 

Kennedy continues to ask the difficult questions people in power in Big Sickcare and Big Pharma don’t want him asking. While we all wish we could trust the CDC, the Covid-19 “pandemic” highlighted very clearly that we absolutely can not trust the CDC.