DETROIT – On Thursday, a group of doctors from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services sounded the alarm that Measles is back as schools are set to reopen. It’s a distressing message about a disease they thought was in the rearview.
“It is one of the most transmissible diseases on the planet,” Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, Chief Medical Executive for the State of Michigan, said. “Our number of cases of measles just in 2026 alone has already surpassed the total for the entire year for 2025.
“We are experiencing the worst year for measles since 1991,” she said. “And we’re just in July.”
Measles, which was declared eliminated in the United States by the CDC back in 2000 after years of dwindling cases and decades of mass vaccinations, has made an unwelcome comeback over the last five years.
The measles spike has been attributed to the steady drop in MMR vaccination rates, as well as what Bagdasarian said are lax attitudes about diseases, along with political misinformation.
“A lot of people think that ‘I had one childhood disease when I was younger, and so now that makes it okay for my child to get other childhood diseases,’” Bagdasarian said, referencing Chickenpox – which did not have a full-scale vaccine in the U.S. until 1995.
“We have to remember that kids have not been getting measles in large-scale numbers like this in decades, and the reason for that is because we’ve got an amazing vaccine that works incredibly well,” she said. “We used to see about 500,000 cases of measles in this country [in the 1950s].”
Bagdasarian said that misinformation trafficked on social media by influencers and conspiracy theorists, some of which is parroted by politicians, has also added to the problem.
“There’s some really troubling political conversations happening around vaccines,” she said. “This should not be a political issue at all.”
“I hope that people are talking to their health care providers and making sure that they’re getting their medical advice from people who are trained and people who have experienced some of the negative consequences of these illnesses,” she added. “Rather than looking just at Internet sources and getting information from social media.”
Vaccination leads to herd immunity.
Herd Immunity was one of the main things stressed on Thursday. To achieve it, at least 95 percent of people need to be vaccinated. The coverage numbers for 2025 – the last available year – have it at 92.5 percent nationwide.
“With something like measles, you have to have coverage of about 95 percent in order to prevent outbreaks,” Dr. Ryan Malosh, MDHHS’s Director of the Division of Immunization, said. “So, that is a real concern.”
According to Johns Hopkins University, Macomb (87.3%), Oakland (87.8%), Monroe (89.9%), and Washtenaw (91.5%) Counties are all well below herd immunity standards. Wayne County’s numbers are unknown.
“If you’re looking at a county that has vaccination rates 88 percent, there are some schools within that county that may have vaccination rates of 95 percent”, Bagdasarian said. “There may be some schools that have vaccination rates as low as 40 percent or 50 percent.”
According to MDHHS, there have been 14 confirmed cases of measles in Michigan so far this year, with half of them being in Washtenaw County earlier this year. All 14 cases were in unvaccinated people – 12 of whom were under age 18. The numbers make it pretty clear what needs to be done.
“This is a terrible year for measles and we’ve already in 2026 had outbreaks here in Michigan, in Washtenaw and Ottawa counties,” she said. “Measles is here.”
“The MMR vaccine in particular is 93 percent protective against measles with one dose, 97 percent protective with two doses,” she said. “I want us to think about where we are as a country, and can we afford to lose kids to this?”