The measles outbreak in West Texas, which hospitalized nearly a hundred and killed two young children, is officially over, state health officials announced in a news release Monday. Officials declare an outbreak over after no new cases have been reported for 42 days.
The state was at the center of the Southwest outbreak, which is ongoing. The Southwest outbreak is the largest single measles outbreak in the United States since the virus was declared eliminated in 2000.
New measles cases have been steadily on the decline in the United States since they peaked in late March — the agency reported just eight new cases in the last week of July and no new cases in the first week of August. However, there are still travel-related cases around the country and an active outbreak in bordering New Mexico. Canada and Mexico are also currently facing large measles outbreaks that together have sickened thousands and caused more than a dozen deaths.
“We can easily see a traveler from one of those areas coming and getting into any susceptible population to start another outbreak,” said Katherine Wells, director of public health in Lubbock, Texas.
Those pockets of unvaccinated, vulnerable communities appear to be growing. New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that vaccination rates among American children entering kindergarten fell during the 2024-25 school year while the percentage of students granted exemptions from vaccines has risen sharply over the past decade.
Just 92 percent of children that year received their measles, mumps and rubella shots. Immunization rates must stay above 95 percent to stem the spread of the virus.
For local officials in Texas, Monday’s announcement is bittersweet. The outbreak did not appear to end as a result of large groups of local residents getting the measles, mumps and rubella shot, said Dr. Phil Huang, director of the Dallas County health department.
Instead, it seemed that the virus had ripped through the community — sickening hundreds — until it ran out of vulnerable people to infect.
“We paid the price,” he said. “There were deaths in this outbreak. There were a lot of hospitalizations.”
Throughout the outbreak, experts said efforts to encourage vaccinations in West Texas were hampered by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who emphasized that vaccines were a personal choice and publicly encouraged unproven remedies for the virus, like cod liver oil. According to doctors in Texas, these endorsements contributed to patients delaying critical care and ingesting toxic levels of vitamin A.
The Southwest outbreak has served as an alarming case study of what may become more common as the Trump administration moves to pull funding from local health departments, legitimize health misinformation and dismantle international safeguards. It also disabused many public health experts of the hope that living through a deadly measles outbreak would change public perceptions about the importance of vaccination. While Dr. Wells thought it might have convinced some parents who were on the fence about getting their children vaccinated, she thought the outbreak may have had the opposite effect for the firm believers.
“Those who were already dug in dug in more,” she said.
Teddy Rosenbluth is a Times reporter covering health news, with a special focus on medical misinformation.
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