By most metrics, measles in the U.S. is out of control. Last week alone, cases jumped by 8%, with 330 infections reported, outpacing the entire total of cases in 2024, in which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted 285 cases. There are large outbreaks in Texas and South Carolina, but Pennsylvania has been hit especially hard lately, with over 1,300 cases and 250 hospitalizations reported this year so far. Due to underreporting, public health officials caution that the true number of cases is likely higher, potentially as high as 6,000. 

“We’ve seen more measles cases during this report than we’ve seen in the last quarter century — combined,” Noel Brewer, a professor of public health at the University of North Carolina, told POLITICO this week. Brewer served on a key vaccine advisory panel to the CDC before Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a noted believer and spreader of anti-vaccine conspiracies, overhauled the committee. 

A highly contagious viral disease, measles is characterized by a distinct rash. Though most people recover, it can cause pneumonia, blindness and swelling in the brain, and erase the immune system’s memory, leading to easily acquired secondary infections. About one to three people out of 1,000 die from measles, with children at the greatest risk of dying. Vaccines against measles are highly effective and safe. According to the World Health Organization, between 2000 and 2024, an estimated 59 million deaths globally were prevented by measles vaccination.

Data from the CDC reports there have been 42 outbreaks this year, there have been at least 4,410 confirmed measles cases as of Oct. 15, almost double the total in 2025. But critics say the CDC isn’t giving the full story. The agency’s measles dashboard lists three deaths, adding one on Wednesday, but Pennsylvania has alone reported five deaths this year, with a sixth under investigation. The CDC still hasn’t named the state where the latest death occurred, although health experts say there is no reason to withhold this info.

Why the discrepancy? That’s what Pennsylvania’s Health Secretary Debra Bogen wants to know. Late last week, Bogen sent a letter to CDC Director Erica Schwartz requesting that the state’s deaths be counted and demanding answers on how the agency is tracking measles fatalities. “By not acknowledging the deaths, the CDC obscures the seriousness of this disease and the toll of measles across the U.S.,” Bogen wrote. Schwartz has only been CDC director since August, replacing acting director Jay Bhattacharya.

It’s not the first time Bogen has sent such a letter. In September, she asked Schwartz to acknowledge the deaths back when the number was four. Later that month, Reuters reported that Kennedy asked Schwartz to remove two measles deaths from the CDC’s dashboard, which she implemented “without objection,” according to three sources familiar with the matter. While the deaths have since been added back to the tally, they are marked with an asterisk indicating that the “number is subject to change.” 

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Pennsylvania Gov Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, has also taken issue with the CDC’s response, publicly blaming Kennedy and the Trump administration for sowing doubt about vaccines. Kennedy has denied being at fault, dismissing the outbreak as a global problem and saying, “We have done better, and particularly, my administration has done better at controlling the outbreak than any other country in the world.” 

Kennedy has made this claim before. It’s true that other countries have seen skyrocketing measles cases, especially Indonesia, Guatemala, India and Bangladesh, with the latter registering over 65,000 infections in the last 12 months. That doesn’t change the fact that the U.S. is experiencing a severe failure to protect the public from measles, with vaccination rates continuing to fall. Yet Kennedy has been reluctant to promote vaccines, continues to cast doubt on their safety and upholds unproven remedies for treating measles, like vitamin A and cod liver oil. That advice has been associated with an increase in calls to poison control for vitamin A exposure, according to research published in June in JAMA Network.

Kennedy has tried to flip the script by accusing Shapiro of “politicizing” the outbreak and refusing federal help. But that assistance was only initially refused because the CDC was not counting deaths accurately, with Pennsylvania requesting emergency assistance in September. The state and the federal government are now working together. Last week the CDC sent a “disease detective” within the agency’s Epidemic Intelligence Service to Pennsylvania.

All this comes as the WHO is due to review the U.S. status on measles elimination, which was achieved in 2000 and is given when a country goes a full 12 months without continuous transmission of the virus. But when the Pan American Health Organization, an arm of the WHO, meets in November, they are expected to revoke the U.S.’s status, just as it did to Canada last November, 25 years after our northern neighbor had eliminated the disease.

Measles is just one of seemingly countless self-inflicted crises at the heart of the Make America Healthy Again movement, which Kennedy spearheaded in his 2024 presidential bid before endorsing Trump and joining the administration. As such, Kennedy has been busy lately stumping for Republicans in the midterms, sometimes hopping aboard military planes to do it, while MAHA-aligned groups have spent nearly $2 million backing candidates associated with the health secretary. POLITICO reported last week that “the MAHA PAC and MAHA Action PAC, two political action committees supporting candidates committed to the health secretary’s agenda, announced they donated a combined $1.65 million to support Republican Zach Lahn’s campaign for governor of Iowa.”

Other than elections, Kennedy’s major focus lately is redefining junk food, but the public is apparently increasingly losing trust in the MAHA movement. Recent data from an Axios-Ipsos poll suggests that only one in four people trust health information coming from Kennedy. While he has emerged as a primary target for Democrats to investigate or even impeach if they win congressional majorities, replacing the health secretary isn’t likely to be enough to restore public health. As healthcare policy experts Steven Grossman and Michael Miller recently wrote in MedPage Today, “even an outcome that brings more pro-vaccine members to Congress will still leave vaccines facing long-term existential threats at both the federal and state levels through regulatory and legislative proposals and actions. Heavy lifting from pro-vaccine policymakers and advocates will be essential over the next 2 years, but this need will likely stretch into 2029 and beyond.”

Amid the deluge of scandals pouring out of the Trump administration, the corruption, war and skyrocketing cost of living, the comeback of measles may not be top of mind for most voters. But every day that public health leadership ignores a spiraling crisis adds up to more people hospitalized, disabled and dead. If the midterms don’t bring some form of reckoning for MAHA and its assault on public health, we can expect to lose a lot more than the WHO’s elimination status.

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The 1975 film “Jaws,” in which a local government hires a shark hunter to protect the town’s tourism industry, delighted me as a 10-year-old. But other than its infamous opening sequence, I don’t recall being scared. My younger sister, however, developed a years-long fear of deep water, even our 11-foot-deep pool. Maybe I’d just cultivated too much shark knowledge, well aware that these apex predators are docile and do not hunt humans like they do in Peter Benchley’s novel. The book and the film — I consumed both and can report that Steven Spielberg’s adaptation is better — only instilled in me a deeper love and respect for sharks. They are still my favorite fish to observe in aquariums or the ocean.

Outside of the movies, shark bounties are uncommon these days. That’s why news this week that Greenland was planning to cull 1,000 Greenland sharks was so alarming to many online. Officials in the Avannaata municipality on the island nation’s west coast approved the plan, offering fishers 300 Danish kroner, or about $45, per shark heart. The government complained that hungry sharks are eating too much Atlantic cod and Greenland halibut, cutting into what humans can bring home and damaging their gear. Lars Erik Gabrielsen, mayor of Avannaata, told The Guardian, “We need to safeguard the income of fishermen and the catch so that we can continue to eat the foods that we have relied on for generations.”

Conservationists and shark lovers were outraged at the proposal. Nick Dulvy, a professor and marine conservationist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, called it a “disaster” and said that biologically, the sharks are “the most sensitive species in the ocean to overfishing.” Marine ecologist Spencer Roberts, whose advocacy work includes calling out shark poaching, posted on X that “There is a psychotic sense of entitlement spreading around the world that imagines humans own the fish in the sea and demands retaliatory killing of predators who rely on these fish. Even centuries-old sages of the Arctic Ocean are not safe from this deranged human delusion.”

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Indeed, the Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus) is bizarre and misunderstood, basically being the couch potato of the depths of the North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean, where waters are just above freezing. Known as an abyssal species, it slothfully trawls the shadows like some mournful Lovecraftian being, possessing an especially sluggish metabolism, which isn’t surprising considering its size. Greenland sharks weigh in at one ton and reaching up to 23 feet in length. The maximum lifespan can average 400 years, the longest lifespan of any known vertebrate, meaning there are apparently Greenland sharks that are older than the United States. If that doesn’t blow you out of the water, I don’t know what will. Humans are famously bad at mentally fathoming deep time, so thinking about these ghostly rotund things hiding in the dark of the ocean, outliving empires like an ichthyological Ozymandias, fills me with even more awe than most sharks do.

In a rare spot of good news, the local government dropped the plan after national officials questioned its legality, but a future cull hasn’t been ruled out. Still, it’s worth upholding this turnaround as an example of why speaking out on animal rights can be successful. We don’t need to just sit back and watch the extinction of any species that doesn’t directly benefit us, while of course recognizing that fishers have to eat too. Some have proposed reimbursing fishers or using acoustic deterrents instead of mass slaughter.

But it’s more than just Greenland sharks at risk, with an estimated 79 million sharks dying in fisheries in 2019. At least 25 million of those species are threatened. As coral reefs struggle to survive, many sharks are losing their main food source, but humans are to blame for that one. These animals can be dangerous, same as a grizzly bear or elephant, but people tend to value sharks a lot less. This is in spite of their critical role in a healthy environment. Sharks aren’t monsters, they evolved to fill very specific roles in the ocean — a huge block in the Jenga of life — and if they go, our oceans would dramatically tumble in ways that would negatively impact humans too.

“Jaws” is a fantastic film if you can suspend your disbelief about a great white being the menace of the seas. That’s really us, but it doesn’t have to be.

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