The truth about rising measles cases - from a physician

Dr. Cory Franklin is not anti-vax, but he thinks health bureaucracies owe Americans (and Canadians) the truth about who is really getting sick. I agree.

A few days ago, an email popped up in my inbox:

My name is Cory Franklin - former head of MICU [medical intensive care unit] at Cook County and editorial board contributor to the Chicago Tribune.

You can look me up.

There is a very serious problem going on in medicine that you would be interested in.

In short, the measles epidemic. I have been studying it for weeks. It’s not the epidemic itself. That is actually milder than we are led to believe. It is the cause.

Yes, it’s unvaccinated patients — but the reason for lack of vaccination looks to be different than the public health/media narrative…

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Naturally, Dr. Franklin had my attention.

As UT readers know, the legacy media has written endlessly about the resurgence of measles since the moment Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became Secretary of Health and Human Services.

In reality, by historical standards — even recent historical standards — our current measles “epidemic” is vastly overstated. As I wrote in March 2025 (paywalled, subscribe to read):

The worst measles epidemic in the last 40 years took place in, wait for it, 1989 and 1990, when over 45,000 Americans were infected — almost 200 times as many as have been infected so far this year. A number of children died, too.

But the outbreak received [only] modest media attention… The reason may have had something to do with the fact the outbreak was centered in poor black and Hispanic communities in New York City — groups reporters did not view as appropriate targets for vaccination shaming campaigns (unlike Mennonites or Orthodox Jews).

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In all, since the beginning of 2025, about 4,000 Americans, mostly unvaccinated, have gotten measles — fewer than one-tenth as many as in 1989 and 1990.

The “epidemic” appeared to be gaining momentum in January, but it has since fizzled, even as the media and health bureaucrat hysteria continues.

What about deaths? Three people have died, including two children. (By way of comparison, an average of 11 two to three American children die every day from drowning. PLEASE watch your children by the pool. NOTE: the original figure of 11 is incorrect, that’s total American drowning deaths for both kids and adults. My error.)

Meanwhile, Canada, which has about one-ninth the population of the United States, has had more than 6,200 cases since the start of 2025. The Canadian figure is equivalent to over 50,000 cases in the United States.

One can only imagine the media’s absolute insanity if the United States had reported 50,000 measles cases since Kennedy took over as HHS Secretary.

But Kennedy cannot be blamed for what’s happening in Canada, so legacy media outlets have politely looked away from the Canadian epidemic.

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(Generally good advice!)

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But when I talked to Dr. Franklin, he made a strong case the Canadian measles outbreak tells us a lot about the real reason that cases have spiked both north and south of the border.

I asked him to write up his thoughts for me. He graciously agreed.

Here they are, with minor edits for length:

Are the public health community and the media telling the straight story about the 2025-2026 measles epidemic? Or are they contravening science and constructing a narrative to conceal it?

Here are the agreed-upon facts. Nearly 2,300 US cases of measles were reported in 2025… Last year, Canada had 25 times as many cases per capita as the US and will likely surpass the US per capita numbers in 2026…In both countries, unvaccinated patients account for 90-95 percent of the cases.

But why are these people are unvaccinated?

The accepted and widely reported narrative is that the measles spread is a result of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s rhetoric and the antivax movement. The main “proof” is the gradual downward trend in kindergarten vaccination in the US, from 95 percent to roughly 92 percent in the last decade…

While Kennedy’s remarks on vaccination are intemperate and may interfere with vaccine campaigns other than measles, the actual data suggest the measles outbreak has little to do with Kennedy and the antivaxxers, despite press and public health assertions.

If vaccine skepticism is not the main driver of the higher caseload, then what is?

The first clue is the ages of infected patients. Unlike the pre-vaccine era, when nearly all cases were children under 13 and cases of adult measles were rare, the current cohort in both the US and Canada is significantly older…

The most logical explanation is that most of these older patients did not originally come from the US or Canada, but from countries with lower vaccination rates. This does not mean the influx of unvaccinated into North America was responsible for actually importing measles, but it may have contributed substantially to the pool of high-risk patients in susceptible communities.

There is circumstantial evidence to support this.

The largest measles outbreak in the US in the last two years was in Spartanburg, South Carolina, which has the largest percentage population of Ukrainian immigrants of any American metropolitan area. Measles vaccination rates in Ukraine were among the lowest in Europe for the first two decades of the 20^th century. A 2024 measles outbreak in Chicago involved primarily migrants from Venezuela, which saw a decline—from 96% in 2017 to 68% in 2021—in routine childhood vaccinations, including measles vaccine.

Canada has seen an even greater increase in immigration, with a 33 percent rise in population since 2000. Currently, the worst outbreak is in Southern Manitoba, a key hub in Canadian immigration. Even a highly publicized outbreak in the Canadian Mennonite community may be partly immigration driven, as Canada’s Mennonite community includes immigrants from Mexico.

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(Mennonites singing. Let’s hope none of them have measles!)

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Still, public health authorities and much of the mainstream media steadfastly maintain the current outbreaks have little or nothing to do with foreign population in-migration.

[Yet] neither American nor Canadian officials are tracking country of origin of patients… That is not science; science involves confronting inconvenient facts, learning from them and crafting interventions.

An influx of unvaccinated people from a particular region or country that subsequently suffers a measles outbreak is crucial information. If unvaccinated migrants from the North Pole settle in areas that then have measles episodes, shouldn’t we insist that immigrants from the North Pole be screened and vaccinated at ports of entry?

With data, authorities and the media could disprove (or confirm) the foreign influx theory rather than simply invoking authority and issuing denials.

There is no excuse for failure to track the ages and country origins of measles patients.

And no excuse for suppressing knowledge that would ultimately help us more effectively screen and vaccinate people who are at the greatest risk of acquiring or spreading this highly contagious disease.

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Franklin is right.

Not for the first time, the media and health bureaucrats are simply refusing to be honest because doing so would undercut their preferred narrative.

By mid-spring 2020, the Centers for Disease Control knew that Covid was at most a minor risk to moderately healthy adults and almost all children, but they simply refused to state that fact clearly. This situation is particularly insidious, though, because this time they won’t collect the data at all. Worse, they are doing so with deliberate political intent.

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What’s particularly interesting: Franklin regularly wrote for legacy media outlets, including the Chicago Tribune as well as explicitly left-leaning outlets like The Guardian, for decades.

But none will to run his opinions on measles, because — even though, as Franklin makes clear, he favors measles vaccination — he is not willing to blame Kennedy for the recent “epidemics.”

The groupthink never ends.

Until it does, parental trust in the legacy media, health bureaucrats, and even individual doctors will keep falling.