The costs of the legacy media's obsession with measles

The New York Times and other outlets are running the same playbook for measles as they did for Covid, highlighting very rare deaths to scare parents.

Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) is a terrible way for a child to die.

SSPE, an untreatable brain disease, usually strikes around age 10. It starts with irritability and muscle weakness and ends in coma and death. And as a frightening opinion piece in the New York Times explained Tuesday, the disease usually occurs as the result of measles infections.

The Times article, written by the mother of a British girl who died of SSPE, offers great detail about the illness. Only one fact is missing: how often it happens.

That’s no mistake.

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Rebecca Archer’s daughter, Renae Walker, contracted measles in 2013 in Manchester, England.

Ten years later, Renae began having trouble writing. Within months, she couldn’t walk. Her sudden decline puzzled doctors, until tests of Renae’s spinal fluid revealed she had SSPE. On Sept. 25, 2023, days before her 11th birthday, she died.

Her death devastated her mother, who explained in her pieces she is telling Renae’s story so parents understand the dangers of measles. Her passion is understandable — and useful to the Times as it relentlessly attacks Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccines.

But just how often does measles cause cases like Renae’s?

In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States ran a registry of SSPE cases. A 1977 paper in the journal Pediatrics reported 375 cases between 1960 and 1974, about 25 a year.

That figure included 40 cases where a child had no record of getting measles but had received the measles vaccine, which contains a “live attenuated” measles virus. Those cases tended to occur about three years after vaccination, more quickly than cases that followed natural infection.

The paper estimated that measles infections carried an SSPE risk of about 1 in 100,000 to 1 in 200,000, while the vaccine might have an SSPE risk of about 1 in 1 million. Overall rates dropped over the tracking period, though the percentage of cases that appeared related to vaccination rather than natural infection rose.¹

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SOURCE

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As I have written before and will no doubt write again, I support measles vaccinations.

My own children were vaccinated against measles. Unlike shots against Covid and flu, which provide at best marginal protection for months, the measles vaccine provides near-complete immunity for decades. And its risks are well understood.

But the reality is that measles is not very dangerous to most children, vaccinated or not. A 2025 paper tracking measles cases for over a century in Switzerland makes this point. Switzerland happens to have been late to the mass measles vaccination party. Its government didn’t recommend the vaccine for kids until 1976.

Nonetheless, per-capita deaths from measles in Switzerland fell more than 99 percent between 1905 and 1975, from roughly 1 in 5,000 per year to about 1 in 1.5 million. The drop occurred in part because measles became less common, but mostly because it became far less lethal.

Again, this drop occurred before Switzerland recommended the vaccine.

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(The red line is 1976, when Switzerland began recommending the measles vaccine.)

SOURCE

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So why does it matter if measles is relatively mild?

After all, measles infections do occasionally cause acute complications, and SSPE is real. Shouldn’t the legacy media do everything possible to make parents aware of those risks, even at the costs of scaring them?

Well, no.

Frightening parents about extremely low risks is both bad journalism and bad public policy. In truth, kids are at far higher risk from drowning, or abusive parents, or car accidents than measles. The Times might want to focus its attention on those problems.

And the fact that measles is relatively low risk doesn’t mean parents shouldn’t get their kids vaccinated. But it does mean they have the right to demand that the measles vaccine - like other vaccines for healthy children - comes with extremely low risk of serious side effects.

If they want to restore trust in medicine, reporters, regulators, and health bureaucrats might want to demonstrate they’re focused on those potential dangers — not just frightening parents by trying to convince them measles is likely to be a death sentence.

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(The facts - and figures - you need, for pennies a day.)

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(And if you missed it, here’s Sunday’s piece about another aspect of the legacy media’s recent measles coverage)

1. In the decades since the Pediatrics paper, vaccine advocates have insisted that the measles vaccine NEVER causes SSPE and that all the apparent vaccine-caused cases must result from measles infections that went unnoticed. The consistently shorter incubation period for vaccine-caused cases makes this argument difficult to believe - and suggests that vaccine advocates are once again refusing to acknowledge reality by pretending that vaccines have zero risk.

But no one disagrees that cases have fallen sharply overall since the onset of mass measles vaccination and that infections are more likely to cause SSPE than vaccination, so I don’t want to belabor the point.