ARCHIVAL (ABC, WORLD NEWS, 2-27-25):
NEWS ANCHOR: The measles outbreak turning deadly in the U.S. The first child to die in a decade.

NARRATION: In 2025, the United States saw a sudden uptick in measles cases.

ARCHIVAL (WHNT, 7-9-25):
NEWS REPORT: Health alert – the United States is seeing the highest number of measles cases reported in three decades.

NARRATION: Vaccines are one of the greatest achievements in the history of public health. . . 

ARCHIVAL (ABC, WORLD NEWS, 2-27-25):
NEWS ANCHOR: Measles was eliminated in the U.S. in 2000.

NARRATION: . . . so why is this disease coming back from the brink of extinction?  

ARCHIVAL (ABC, WORLD NEWS, 2-27-25):
NEWS ANCHOR: . . . Some pointing to vaccine skepticism in this country. 

NARRATION: And that skepticism is putting the nation’s health at risk. How did we get to this point where personal belief is more powerful than science?

BRENDAN NYHAN: When someone’s already sucked into that myth, it’s a very difficult thing to talk them out of it.

ARCHIVAL (FOOTAGE.COM):
ANNOUNCER: Dr. Jonas Salk discovers a vaccine that promises to wipe out childhood’s crippling and killing enemy, polio.

NARRATION: In the 1950s, the Salk vaccine was greeted with open arms.

ARCHIVAL (DOCUMENTARY, “BABIES AND BREADWINNERS,” 1961):
ANNOUNCER: Civic clubs had immunization parties.

NARRATION: Polio, smallpox, diptheria, no longer a threat in the U.S. because of vaccines. And in 2000, another watershed moment.

ARCHIVAL (NBC, NIGHTLY NEWS):
JANE PAULEY: The C.D.C. reports the measles practically wiped out tonight in the United States.

NARRATION: But that report proved overly optimistic. Measles is back, and another disease that looked like it was disappearing a generation ago is making a comeback: whooping cough. 

Unlike measles, its return is in part attributed to the waning effectiveness of its vaccine, but it shows how the spread of a disease can impact the most vulnerable. 

San Francisco mother Mariah Bianchi knows this firsthand. When her son was born in August 2005, as a nurse, she realized something was wrong. 

MARIAH BIANCHI: It was just like he was so lethargic, and I knew that there was just something. I’m like, I can’t keep him awake. We went to the doctor, and she said, I want you to go to the hospital. As soon as he got there, he went into cardiac arrest.

NARRATION: What she didn’t realize was that the immunity from her own whooping cough vaccine had worn off, and her newborn was too young to be inoculated.

MARIAH BIANCHI: And they started C.P.R. right away, for probably about 45 minutes or so. As a nurse I’m thinking, I know what that means. Your brain is not getting oxygen. Your body is failing. And the surgeon came out, and he said his chance of survival is very low. We made the most compassionate decision you could, but we just said, you know, don’t – don’t do it. Just stop.

NARRATION: Dylan Bianchi died 17 days after he was born.

Vulnerable people like newborns depend on the immunity of those around them to protect them from dangerous diseases. To keep measles from spreading, for example, about 94 percent of a community needs to be vaccinated. It’s called herd immunity. In some areas, that’s a concern. 

SETH MNOOKIN (DIRECTOR, GRADUATE PROGRAM IN SCIENCE WRITING M.I.T.): The measles vaccine has been so effective, it doesn’t seem like something we need to protect our children from. You have this sort of fundamental paradox of vaccines – that they’ve become a victim of their own success.

NARRATION: Science writer Seth Mnookin examines the fear about the measles vaccine in his book “The Panic Virus.” He says it can be traced to a moment in the late 1990s.

SETH MNOOKIN: The current vaccine scares and controversies that we’re still dealing with today stem from a 1998 paper that appeared in The Lancet, a very respected medical journal published out of the U.K.

NARRATION: The paper, written by Andrew Wakefield, claimed there might be a connection between the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine and autism.

SETH MNOOKIN: In his press conference, Andrew Wakefield stood up and said parents should not give their children the M.M.R. vaccine, period, until we are able to get to the bottom of this.

ARCHIVAL (ITN, 1998):
ANDREW WAKEFIELD: The M.M.R. vaccination in combination, that I think it should be suspended in favor of the single vaccines. 

SETH MNOOKIN: What the media in the U.K. did was, they ran with that.

ARCHIVAL (ITN):
REPORTER: Doctors at the Royal Free Hospital believe they may have discovered a link between the combination vaccine and a bowel disease that can progress to autism.

SETH MNOOKIN: The notion that you would take a 12-person case study and make claims about a population as a whole is ridiculous. This paper was historically bad.

NARRATION: It was later revealed that Wakefield also had a financial stake in trying to establish a connection between the M.M.R. vaccine and autism. 

SETH MNOOKIN: Right before this paper came out, Andrew Wakefield took out a patent for an alternative measles vaccine of exactly the type that parents would want if his hypothesis was true. Andrew Wakefield was receiving money from a lawyer who was working with parents intent on suing vaccine manufacturers.

NARRATION: Wakefield denies the allegations, but records show he was paid more than 435 thousand pounds.

SETH MNOOKIN: Another thing he claimed in the paper, that the children that he looked at were just a random group of kids. It turns out that many of them were actually sent to him by this lawyer. Perhaps the, the most shocking revelation is that he faked some of the data.

NARRATION: An investigation by the British Medical Journal, BMJ, found that Wakefield had altered or misrepresented all 12 of the cases he had cited, and 10 of his original co-authors withdrew their names from the study.

SETH MNOOKIN: He’s lost his medical license, the Lancet paper has been retracted, but he had very effectively positioned himself as a martyr, and in some odd way, every piece of evidence that comes out against Wakefield sort of solidifies his standing in the community that still pays attention to him.

NARRATION: Follow-up studies of hundreds of thousands of children did not find any evidence that the M.M.R. vaccine causes autism. But early on, fears about vaccine safety took hold because complicated science proved difficult for public health institutions to communicate. Case in point: their response when concerns were raised over a vaccine preservative called thimerosal, which contains ethyl mercury.

ARCHIVAL (C-SPAN, 2001):
FORMER REP. DAN BURTON (R-INDIANA): Children are getting mercury injected into their bodies with vaccines. 

ARCHIVAL (CBS, 7-15-05):
SHARYL ATKISSON: That’s right, mercury, a known neurotoxin.

NARRATION: But ethyl mercury in thimerosal is not the same as the toxic methyl mercury, which is found in fish and accumulates in the body. Nevertheless, the Public Health Service and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended thimerosal be removed, and their messaging backfired.

ARCHIVAL (CBS, 5-18-04):
NEWS ANCHOR: In 1999, health officials denied a link between vaccines and the autism epidemic, yet urged vaccine makers to take out the mercury just to be safe.

SETH MNOOKIN: What the American Academy of Pediatrics said is, we are recommending this step so we can make safe vaccines even safer. As a parent, if you tell me something’s safe, I don’t think that’s on a sliding scale. I assume that if you say it’s safe, it is safe for my child. It’s not safe, safer, safest. There are almost two languages here. There’s the language of science, and then there’s English, and in the language of science, you have these signifiers like – to the best of our knowledge, as far as we know.

ARCHIVAL (CBS, EVENING NEWS, 5-28-04):
DR. STEVE COCHI (C.D.C. IMMUNIZATION PROGRAM): Based on the available scientific evidence.

SETH MNOOKIN: Because you can’t say anything with 100 percent – you can’t prove a negative. And so, when scientists speak in their language and the rest of us translate that into English, it sounds like they’re saying something very different than they’re saying.

ARCHIVAL (CBS, EARLY SHOW, 7-15-05):
DR. TANJA POPOVIC (CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL): Based on what we know right now, we don’t think that there is an association.
REPORTER: But that’s not saying with 100 percent certainty there isn’t one.
DR. TANJA POPOVIC: That is saying that based on the evidence we have right now, we don’t think there is one.

SETH MNOOKIN: Either because the reporter doesn’t understand what’s actually going on, or because they’re looking to generate a story, they then take that and make it seem as if the scientist is saying, I think there’s a possibility that vaccines do cause autism,  when in fact that’s not it at all.

BRENDAN NYHAN (DARTMOUTH COLLEGE): News organizations should exercise judgment about what goes out over their air.

NARRATION: Brendan Nyhan is a professor at Dartmouth College who studies how misinformation spreads and the role of the media. 

BRENDAN NYHAN: What’s particularly important is to think about the overall scientific consensus. Where is the weight of the evidence? And is our reporting reflecting that or not? That’s what’s often gone astray in the vaccine debate.

ARCHIVAL (NBC, THE TODAY SHOW, 10-30-08):
DR. NANCY SNYDERMAN: It’s time for everyone to redirect the questions toward finding the cause of autism. It is not, however, vaccinations.
MATT LAUER: Controversial subject, Nancy.
NANCY SNYDERMAN: Not controversial subject.
MATT LAUER: Well, controversial for parents who still believe.
NANCY SNYDERMAN: It is not controversial, Matt. It’s time for kids to get their vaccines.

BRENDAN NYHAN: Everyday people can’t be fact-checkers for every story about vaccines, and when journalists don’t give people the weight of the scientific evidence, they’re letting them down.

ARCHIVAL (CBS, 5-18-04):
JENNIFER LASSITER (MOTHER): She got her vaccinations, she ran a low-grade fever, she had a little rash, and then she stopped talking.

NARRATION: A false sense of balance was also created when scientific evidence was equated to people‘s personal experiences.

SETH MNOOKIN: Reporting fell into this – on the one hand, on the other hand –  fallacy, this notion that if you have two sides that are disagreeing, that means that you should present both of them with equal weight.

ARCHIVAL (ABC, OPRAH, 9-24-07):
JENNY MCCARTHY: We vaccinated our baby, and something happened. That’s it.

SETH MNOOKIN: Jenny McCarthy has had more to do with popularizing the notion that vaccines are dangerous than any other single person in the United States.

ARCHIVAL (CNN, LARRY KING LIVE, 9-27-07):
LARRY KING: We begin, of course, with Jenny McCarthy, the actress and entertainment personality. Her son Evan has autism.

SETH MNOOKIN: She’s very smart, she’s telegenic.

ARCHIVAL (CNN, LARRY KING LIVE, 9-27-07):
JENNY MCCARTHY: Lookit, it’s plain and simple. It’s bullshit.
DOCTOR: No, it’s not.
JENNY MCCARTHY: Yes, it is.
DOCTOR: Excuse me.

SETH MNOOKIN: When I look at clips of her, it’s a completely unfair fight.

ARCHIVAL (ABC, OPRAH, 9-24-07):
JENNY MCCARTHY: My science is named Evan, and he’s at home. That’s my science.

SETH MNOOKIN: Jenny McCarthy has said many times, and oftentimes very loudly, that, you know, her child is her scientific fact. Any scientist or any science reporter who’s familiar with how science works would say that no, any one person is an anecdote, and the plural of anecdote is not data, you know? It’s just a story.

NARRATION: But these kinds of stories are powerful, especially today as they spread quickly on social media, where accurate public health messaging faces challenges. 

Brendan Nyhan studied what happened when vaccine-hesitant parents were given information from the C.D.C. stating there’s no evidence that the M.M.R. vaccine causes autism.  

BRENDAN NYHAN: The good news was, it did cause parents to be less likely to believe in the myth that the M.M.R. vaccine causes autism. The bad news is, however, that it made them less likely to say they would vaccinate a child, which is precisely the opposite of what we would hope to see. What we found is that telling people the correct information wasn’t actually effective.

NARRATION: And the repercussions can be serious.

ARCHIVAL (WRAL, 4-27-25):
NEWS ANCHOR: A new study released this week finds that the U.S. could face millions of measles cases in the next 25 years if routine vaccine rates continue to decline. 

NARRATION: In February 2025, many vaccine proponents were alarmed when Robert Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as the secretary of Health and Human Services. He has a history of repeating the false claim that the M.M.R. vaccine causes autism. 

And while he initially encouraged people to get the M.M.R. vaccine in response to the outbreaks. . . 

ARCHIVAL (CBS MORNINGS, 4-9-25):
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: We encourage people to get the measles vaccine.

NARRATION:. . .  he then equivocated a few months later.

ARCHIVAL (C-SPAN, 5-13-25):
REPRESENTATIVE MARK POCAN: If you had a child today, would you vaccinate that child for measles?
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: My opinions about vaccines are irrelevant. I don’t want to seem like I’m being evasive, but  I don’t think people should be taking advice – medical advice – from me.

NARRATION: It remains to be seen what impact this messaging – coming from the head of the agency charged with setting vaccine recommendations for the country – may have on future vaccination rates.

For Mariah Bianchi, the notion of leaving some people vulnerable is hard to understand.

MARIAH BIANCHI: What does it take? How many times do you have to tell people or talk about it? We all have a role in helping each other to protect each other. A vaccine-preventable disease should not have killed my son.

(END)