We have to start with some bad news.
An 8-year-old girl with measles died Thursday morning, the second known measles-related death in an ongoing outbreak that has infected nearly 500 Texans since January. Her funeral was Sunday at a church in Seminole followed by a private burial.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., visited the West Texas town that has been the epicenter of the outbreak Sunday and was expected to meet with the family.
“My intention was to come down here quietly to console the families and to be with the community in their moment of grief,” Kennedy wrote on social media. He went on to describe the resources he deployed to Texas in March after another school-aged child died from measles, claiming that the “growth rates for new cases and hospitalizations have flattened” since Kennedy sent a team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The state reported 59 new cases in three days last week.
The child who died Thursday, Daisy Hildebrand, was not vaccinated and had no known underlying health conditions, said a spokesperson for University Medical Center in Lubbock, where she had been hospitalized. She died from “measles pulmonary failure,” the Texas Department of State Health Services reported Sunday.
“This unfortunate event underscores the importance of vaccination,” Vice President of University Medical Center Aaron Davis said in a statement. “We encourage all individuals to stay current with their vaccinations to help protect themselves and the broader community.”
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A CDC spokesperson said in an email that Kennedy’s visit to Texas on Sunday resulted in discussions with Texas state health officials to deploy a second CDC response team to West Texas to further assist with the state’s efforts to protect its residents against measles and its complications.
Dr. Manisha Patel, incident manager for the CDC, said their team arrived in Gaines County in March and left on April 1. A spokesperson for the CDC said in light of today’s news and Kennedy’s order to re-deploy, another team will be in the county.
“We’re learning a lot in Gaines County on how we can help other jurisdictions also prepare for measles in their states,” Patel said.
Patel said it’s important to go in with a sensitive approach when it comes to small, close-knit communities that are unvaccinated.
“MMR is the best way to protect yourself, your families, your communities against measles,” Patel said. “And, if you’re starting to get very sick from measles, not to delay care.”
Patel said for some communities, it’s important to find trusted messengers. In some cases, she said, the federal government might not be the best choice for that and it has to be someone in the community. To work around this, Patel said they’ve worked directly with state and local health departments to find who the trusted messengers are.
“Our role is making sure those trusted messengers have the materials and information they need,” Patel said. “So we translate, for example, materials into a German or Spanish or whatever the community needs.”
It feels a little weird to me to name the children who died – the first child was named in a paragraph I didn’t quote; this was the first time I had seen her name – but I suppose that information was already out there. I’ll get back to RFK Jr in a minute, but in the meantime, this third death (there was also an adult who died) has Your Local Epidemiologist pondering the overall case numbers.
Before this year, there had only been three measles deaths since 2000:
- 2015: A 28-year-old immunocompromised woman in Washington was exposed in a clinic.
- 2003: A 75-year-old traveler from California with pneumonia. The other was a 13-year-old immunocompromised child (post–bone marrow transplant) living between Illinois and Mexico.
Today’s situation is different. It’s younger, healthier kids. And it’s happening more often.
This raises a critical question: Are we seeing the full picture?
As of Saturday, there were 636 measles cases nationwide, 569 in the Panhandle outbreak alone, and 3 deaths. But that death toll doesn’t quite make sense.
- Measles typically causes 1 to 3 deaths per 1,000 unvaccinated cases.
- At that rate, 3 deaths would suggest somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000 more cases—not just 569.
This outbreak may be significantly underreported and the largest in decades. Other signs point in the same direction, including very sick hospitalized patients (reflecting delays in seeking care), and epidemiologists are encountering resistance to case investigations.
Of course, there’s another possibility: this could simply be a statistical anomaly. Three deaths among a few hundred cases isn’t impossible—it’s just extremely rare. We’ve seen similar situations before. In 1991, for example, an outbreak in Philadelphia caused 1,400 cases and 9 pediatric deaths. In that case, religious leaders discouraged medical care, relying on prayer instead.
But whether this is an undercount or an outlier, one thing is clear: we are in new, unsettling territory.
We probably won’t have a decent guess at that until after it’s all over. If we’re lucky.
Back to RFK Jr, and yeah, I know.
After visiting the epicenter of Texas’ growing measles outbreak, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, tweeted out praise for a pair of Lone Star State doctors with records of dispensing endorsing alternative treatments that contradict guidance from infectious disease experts.
Kennedy, one of the nation’s highest-profile vaccine skeptics, called both physicians “extraordinary healers,” even though one of the two was disciplined roughly 20 years ago by the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners for ordering unnecessary tests and false diagnoses, according to state records.
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Kennedy shared photos from the trip and lavished praised on the two doctors with the history of dispensing unconventional treatments. The HHS secretary commended Dr. Richard Bartlett and Dr. Ben Edwards, whom he said had “treated and healed some 300 measles-stricken Mennonite children using aerosolized budesonide and clarithromycin.”
Although medical researchers have explored aerosolized budesonide and clarithromycin as possible measles treatments, most health experts accept that there’s no “cure” for measles — only treatments that can mitigate the symptoms.
For his part, Bartlett was disciplined by the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners in 2003 for ordering unnecessary diagnostic tests, improper management of a patient’s diabetes and “questionably diagnosing” another patient with bronchitis despite having normal lung function, according to state records obtained by the Current.
Bartlett also touted unproved steroid treatments as a cure for COVID-19, according to TK.
Meanwhile, Edwards has a history of criticizing the measles vaccine, including proclaiming in a podcast that the Texas outbreak was “God’s version of measles immunization,” the Washington Post reports.
I’ve mentioned Ben Edwards before; Richard Bartlett is a new name to me. I’m sure you can surmise what I think of them. By the way, if you click over to that article, you can see the tweet in which RFK Jr poses for pictures with the families of the two dead girls, and names them. I don’t know if that makes him the source of that information, but there it is anyway.
That said, more people are getting their MMR vaccines now.
More than 218,000 Texans got the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine during the first three months of 2025, according to data from the state’s Department of State Health Services. That total is about 16% higher than the number of Texans who received the shot during the same timeframe last year.
The most notable increase has been in the South Plains area, which has seen a 60% rise this year compared to the same period in 2024, according to the data. Vaccinations are also up 13% in the public health region that includes Houston.
Public health experts said the increases have been encouraging amid an outbreak that has grown to more than 500 cases in Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma. But vaccination rates in many Texas communities still fall short of the threshold of 95% vaccination coverage that is needed to achieve herd immunity, which prevents widespread outbreaks.
“It’s still a struggle,” Katherine Wells, the director of public health for the city of Lubbock, said of the efforts to improve vaccination rates. “It’s definitely following the news cycle. When there’s a local story about an exposure or sick kids, I think more people come to get vaccinated.”
Lubbock Public Health set up a drive-up MMR vaccine clinic to offer shots that is serving 20 to 30 people on an average day. Wells estimated that half the traffic to the clinic has been individuals who were recently exposed to the virus; the vaccine may provide some protection or lessen the severity of illness if it’s administered within 72 hours of an exposure, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Vaccinating healthy individuals before they are exposed has been trickier, Wells said. Public health officials have been stressing that one dose of the MMR vaccine is 93% effective at preventing an infection, and two doses are 97% effective.
The Immunization Partnership, a Houston-based nonprofit, has been working with school districts, day cares, pediatricians and public health clinics to improve vaccination rates in the South Plains region and elsewhere. Demand has not been high enough to contain the outbreak, said Terri Burke, the nonprofit’s executive director.
“I don’t think we’re making the headway we ought to ought to be making,” she said.
More Texas residents have been seeking out the MMR vaccine as the outbreak continues to spread. The number of shots administered across the state between Jan. 1 and March 31 was the highest during that timeframe in the last six years, according to DSHS data.
The DSHS noted that the data is not comprehensive, because Texas residents must opt-in to share their vaccination status with the Texas Immunization Registry. It’s also not clear if people were receiving their first or second dose of the vaccine.
It may not be enough, but it’s still better than it was. I’ll take my good news where I can.
And with all that intro, here’s your Tuesday case count update.
The latest update from the Texas Department of State Health Services shows that 505 people have been infected with measles since the outbreak began in late January in the South Plains region. Fifty-seven people have been hospitalized for treatment.
The update comes two days after the DSHS reported the death of a second child amid the outbreak. A 6-year-old child died in late February, marking the first measles death in the U.S. since 2015. Neither child had received the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, and they did not have any underlying medical conditions, according to the DSHS.
Cases continue to be concentrated in school-aged children who have not received the MMR vaccine, or whose vaccination status is unknown.
The Texas outbreak has also spread to New Mexico, which reported 56 cases on Tuesday, and Oklahoma, which reported 10 cases. New Mexico has also reported one suspected measles death, an unvaccinated adult who tested positive for the virus after dying.
The latest DSHS update includes 24 new cases, an increase of about 5% since the agency’s last update on Friday.
The DSHS said there is ongoing measles transmission in 10 counties across the state: Cochran, Dallam, Dawson, Gaines, Garza, Lynn, Lamar, Lubbock, Terry and Yoakum.
Of the 24 new cases, 13 are in Gaines County, which continues to be the epicenter of the outbreak. The county has now reported 328 cases since late January, nearly 65% of all Texas cases associated with the outbreak.
There are three new cases in Lubbock County, increasing its total to 36, and Terry County, raising its total to 46. Two new cases were reported in Hale County, which has now seen five in total.
Three counties reported one new case apiece, including Borden and Randall counties, which reported their first cases associated with the outbreak.
Of the 505 cases in Texas, 160 have been in children younger than 5 years old and 191 have been in children and teens between 5 and 17, according to the DSHS.
Only 10 cases have been in people who received at least one dose of MMR vaccine prior to an infection.
The latest DSHS update does not include any Harris County cases associated with the outbreak. Harris County Public Health was notified last week that testing conducted by a commercial laboratory confirmed a northwest Harris County child had measles, but officials noted the DSHS needed to verify the test results.
Texas has reported a total of six measles cases in 2025 that are not connected to the South Plains outbreak, including three in Harris County and one in Fort Bend County. Most of those cases are associated with international travel, and they are not included in the Texas outbreak total of 505.
I’ll chase down the other states’ numbers for the Friday update. Randall County, by the way, includes part of Amarillo, so that’s another major metro area with cases in it.
The Associated Press has a bit more detail.
As of Friday, there were seven cases at a day care where one young child who was infectious gave it to two other children before it spread to other classrooms, Lubbock Public Health director Katherine Wells said.
“Measles is so contagious I won’t be surprised if it enters other facilities,” Wells said.
There are more than 200 children at the day care, Wells said, and most have had least one dose of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, which is first recommended between 12 and 15 months old and a second shot between 4 and 6 years old.
“We do have some children that have only received one dose that are now infected,” she said.
The public health department is recommending that any child with only one vaccine get their second dose early, and changed its recommendation for kids in Lubbock County to get the first vaccine dose at 6 months old instead of 1. A child who is unvaccinated and attends the day care must stay home for 21 days since their last exposure, Wells said.
That doesn’t sound good. Here’s some more on the updated MMR vaccine guidance for Lubbock. All I can say is I hope plenty of people follow that advice.
UPDATE: Hello, El Paso.
William Beaumont Army Medical Center has confirmed El Paso’s first case of measles connected to the ongoing West Texas and Panhandle outbreak.
The patient was checked in Friday at the Mendoza Soldier Family Care Center on Fort Bliss, according to a Tuesday news release. Amabilia G. Payen, a spokesperson for the medical center, did not provide further details about the patient, including vaccination history.
“That is why prevention is so important,” said Maj. Lacy Male, Army public health nurse, in the news release. “The measles vaccine is highly effective, and two doses provide 97 percent protection against the disease, making it one of the best tools for prevention. There is no treatment for measles, only supportive therapy. We want to vaccinate to prevent infection altogether.”
Army health officials began contact tracing efforts to mitigate the spread of the disease, and also notified local and state health officials. The El Paso Department of Public Health has not responded to questions from El Paso Matters.
In addition to El Paso’s measles case, Mexican health authorities confirmed four cases of measles, or sarampión, in neighboring Ciudad Juárez as of Monday.
It’s just gonna keep on spreading, because that’s what measles does.
