I wish I didn’t feel the need to keep following these stories, but unfortunately I do.
South Carolina on Friday reported 124 new measles cases in the last three days, bringing the total number to 558 in the state’s fast-growing outbreak. Cases have nearly doubled in the last week alone.
“We have right now the largest outbreak in the U.S., and it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Dr. Helmut Albrecht, an infectious disease physician with Prisma Health and the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, said in a briefing Friday. Hundreds of people in other parts of the state are already in quarantine or isolation, he said.
The epicenter is in Spartanburg County, in the northwest part of the state. The area has also seen a jump in students with nonmedical exemptions to required school vaccines since the pandemic. New research published this week in the journal JAMA finds these exemptions are growing in counties across the U.S. — making them vulnerable to outbreaks.
And concerns are growing that infections are spreading beyond the county. There have already been six cases in neighboring North Carolina linked to the Spartanburg outbreak. And three measles cases have been confirmed in Snohomish County, Wash., that are also connected to Spartanburg.
“We have lost our ability to contain this with the immunity that we have,” Albrecht said, urging people to get vaccinated.
The vaccination rate among students in Spartanburg County is 90% overall, which is lower than the 95% threshold needed to prevent measles. Measles is one of the most contagious diseases. A single case can infect up to 18 other people on average.
The epicenter is in Spartanburg County, in the northwest part of the state. The area has also seen a jump in students with nonmedical exemptions to required school vaccines since the pandemic. New research published this week in the journal JAMA finds these exemptions are growing in counties across the U.S. — making them vulnerable to outbreaks.
And concerns are growing that infections are spreading beyond the county. There have already been six cases in neighboring North Carolina linked to the Spartanburg outbreak. And three measles cases have been confirmed in Snohomish County, Wash., that are also connected to Spartanburg.
“We have lost our ability to contain this with the immunity that we have,” Albrecht said, urging people to get vaccinated.
The vaccination rate among students in Spartanburg County is 90% overall, which is lower than the 95% threshold needed to prevent measles. Measles is one of the most contagious diseases. A single case can infect up to 18 other people on average.
[…]
The new JAMA study found the rate of nonmedical exemptions has risen steadily in the majority of U.S. counties, and this trend has accelerated since the pandemic. The researchers examined exemption data from more than 3,000 U.S. counties and jurisdictions in 45 states plus the District of Columbia from 2010 to 2024.
In most states, even if the overall vaccination rate is high, there are pockets with higher rates of these nonmedical exemptions, says Dr. Nathan Lo, a physician-scientist with Stanford University and one of the study’s authors.
“When you think about infectious disease outbreaks, it only takes a really small pocket of under-vaccinated individuals to create and sustain an outbreak,” Lo says.
Higher exemptions tend to go hand in hand with lower vaccination rates, and there are a lot of communities vulnerable to potential outbreaks, says Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. He says all they need is one spark to ignite it.
“There are a lot more South Carolinas waiting to happen,” he says.
Which is why I keep following these stories. The big Texas outbreak from earlier in 2025 saw a total of 762 cases, not that much more than what South Carolina has recorded so far despite having a much lower population. There was also a big outbreak in Utah and Arizona around the time the South Carolina one got started, and there were multiple smaller outbreaks around the country during the Texas situation. The Trump administration has made this all worse, and there’s no end in sight for that. So yeah, the locations and the under-vaxxed populations may change, but the outlook remains the same. This is the new normal for the foreseeable future. I’ve now heard more than one infectious disease expert say that they don’t expect anything to break the spell of the anti-vaxxers until the toll of measles, whooping cough, and who knows what else to get uncomfortably high. And on that happy thought, have a nice day.