Staffers from a pediatric medicine office in Spartanburg, South Carolina, on January 30, 2026 assess a patient with measles symptoms from the parking lot outside their building.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. RAMBLED THROUGH a long list of topics when he spoke at the White House during Thursday’s cabinet meeting.
He talked about dietary guidelines and rural health care. Prescription drugs and medical research. He even mentioned hospital price transparency, which is one of the more obscure parts of his portfolio as secretary of health and human services.
But there was one subject Kennedy skipped, in an omission as disturbing as it was conspicuous. He didn’t say a word about the measles outbreak in South Carolina, which is the nation’s biggest in decades.
As of this past Wednesday, the South Carolina Department of Public Health had logged more than eight hundred cases of the highly contagious disease, with many more unreported infections presumably out there because not all parents seek formal medical care for their kids. The official tally is now growing by more than a hundred cases each week and has blown past the count from last year’s Texas outbreak, which killed three people, including the first two American children to die of measles in a decade.
“This is a milestone that we have reached in a relatively short period of time, very unfortunately, and it’s just disconcerting to consider what our final trajectory will look like,” South Carolina state epidemiologist Linda Bell said during a briefing on Wednesday.
South Carolinians aren’t the only ones who should worry. ...
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