Measles Cases Surged 20% Globally But Deaths Declined by 8% — Are More Vaccines the Answer?

A new report from the CDC and WHO blamed lower global vaccination rates for the increase in measles. Critics said the global regions affected by measles need economic support, not more drugs.

by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.

Measles vaccination rates worldwide dropped during the COVID-19 pandemic period and have not returned to their pre-pandemic levels, according to a report published last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

The report, which analyzed “progress toward measles elimination” between 2000-2023, cited a 20% global surge in measles cases between 2022 and 2023 — yet researchers also found that the number of deaths from measles declined by 8%.

Falling vaccination rates are driving the rise in cases, the report concluded. During the pandemic, estimated global coverage with one dose of a two-dose measles-containing vaccine declined to 81%, they reported.

CDC data published last year showed that in the last two decades, global measles vaccination rates had been rising steadily — from 72% in 2000 to 86% in 2019. They fell 5 percentage points in 2021, to 81%, but then inched up to 83% in 2022.

Globally, approximately 83% of children received their first dose of the measles vaccine in 2023, and 74% got their recommended second dose, the health organizations said. More than 22 million children missed getting vaccinated altogether, the health agencies said in a press conference that accompanied the report. Health officials credited the vaccines for averting 60.3 million measles deaths between 2000-2023.

Most of the estimated 107,500 reported deaths globally from measles in 2023 occurred in the African region, a WHO spokesperson said, which was published in the CDC’s online Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Measles deaths most commonly occur “in low-income countries and countries experiencing fragile, conflict-affected, and vulnerable settings, which exacerbate inequities,” the report said.

According to the report, vaccination coverage is also the lowest in such countries. The researchers concluded that higher vaccination rates, particularly in vulnerable countries, would be necessary to eliminate measles.

“The link they draw between lower vaccination rates and higher case numbers is simply based on correlation,” Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior scientist for Children’s Health Defense, told The Defender.

“This isn’t a trial or even an observational study. It is simply a meta-analysis of other countries’ public health data that has all of the limitations of highly variable data quality,” he said.

The WHO spokesperson explained that the case fatality rate of measles in places like the U.S. and Europe is much lower than in many regions in Africa due to better nutrition and access to healthcare.

Studies show that children with weakened immune systems caused by malnutrition or other underlying diseases are more vulnerable to death from the disease. However, the public health agencies continue to focus on increasing vaccination rates, rather than on tackling broader issues of public health.

“Historically and everywhere, measles prevalence disappears when living conditions improve,” said Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., an excess mortality researcher and lead scientist for more than 20 years at the University of Ottawa in Canada.

Rancourt, who also studies the effect of poverty on mortality, suggested that addressing poverty and improving public health and political stability through investments in economic infrastructure — not through military interventions and vaccination campaigns — would be a more effective strategy.

He added:

“Giving these vaccines to impoverished and oppressed populations, whether domestic or foreign, is an evil and cynical exercise motivated by corporate greed and geopolitical dominance.

“These vaccination campaigns are a structural mechanism used as a pretext for not actually helping these populations with opportunities for sovereign economic development and equitable trade.”

Measles has been ‘eliminated’ in the Americas, despite recent alarmism

During the press conference, a WHO spokesperson explained that the “elimination” of measles means there are no locally transmitted cases with a train of transmission that goes on for more than 12 months.

Globally, measles deaths have declined substantially. Eighty-two countries, including the entire region of the Americas, are free of endemic measles — despite media reports claiming that measles rates are skyrocketing in Canada and the U.S. and that “anti-vaccine campaigns” are triggering a return of the disease.

In the 2023-2024 school year, the measles vaccination rate in the U.S. fell to 92.7%, according to CDC data released in October. As of Nov. 7, only 277 measles cases had been reported in the U.S. in 2024, with 16 outbreaks and no deaths according to the CDC’s Measles Cases and Outbreaks page.

The case fatality rate, a measure of disease severity, represents the percentage of diagnosed individuals who die from a disease within a specific period. That rate is not constant but varies depending on the context, time, population, treatment and the patient’s ability to recover.

According to the CDC’s data, the measles death rate in the U.S. declined by over 98% between 1900 and 1962. When the measles vaccine came out in 1963, the mortality rate had already declined to 0.2 per 100,000 people (as of 1960), or a case fatality rate of 2 per 10,000.

Jablonowski criticized the CDC-WHO report for failing to address possible adverse effects of the measles vaccine. He noted that the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) has logged 254 reports for mortalities associated with the vaccine in the U.S.

In addition to tracking vaccination rates, the researchers also tracked reported measles cases and identified the genotypes, or variants, of measles types circulating.

There are 24 known measles genotypes, but only 19 have been seen since 1990, and only four have been seen since 2018.

Jablonowski pointed out that the measles vaccine is based on genotype A, yet the report identified types B3 and D8 as circulating. “Genotype D8 is about as far removed evolutionarily as you get from the vaccine genotype A in the modern strains,” he said. “I would interpret this as the vaccine driving the evolution of wild-type measles by making variants less like the vaccine-variant more successful.”