Opinion | The Monster Measles Outbreak in Europe Is a Warning – The New York Times

In 2022, there were 941 reported cases of measles in the World Health Organizations European region. Over just the first 10 months of last year, according to an alarming bulletin the W.H.O. issued in mid-December, there were more than 30,000.

This is the kind of spike a 3,000 percent increase that looks implausible in headlines. And it appears even more significant compared to recent years, when efforts to limit Covid also resulted in almost entirely eliminating measles in Europe in 2021. (In a lot of places, we sort of accidentally eliminated the spread of flu, too.)

But as the year drew to a close, the European measles outbreak kept growing. Through December, case numbers in the region eventually reached over 42,000, and although the largest outbreaks were in countries most Americans regard as pretty remote (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia), there is also a vicious surge in Britain, which may look plausibly to us as the canary in a coal mine. There, in just one of Englands nine regions, the West Midlands, 260 cases have been confirmed and dozens more suspected, in a country which, as a whole, recorded just two cases as recently as 2021.

Almost certainly, the virologist Rik de Swart of Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam told me, these official case totals are significant underestimates. But as intimidatingly large as they are, the outbreaks are not in any way surprising to infectious disease specialists, who have been warning that long-term declines in vaccination rates were creating the possibility of a huge resurgence. This is precisely what is expected, the epidemiologist Michael Mina, formerly of Harvard, told me. The epidemiologist Bill Hanage, also at Harvard, lamented it as a chronicle of an outbreak foretold.

There have been worrying outbreaks, too, in the United States, where the occurrence of a few dozen cases nationwide is sufficient to command federal public health attention. But it is striking especially given pandemic panic about Americas exceptional-seeming resistance to vaccination that the worlds highest-profile post-Covid measles surge has come not here but in Europe.

Almost since the beginning of the pandemic, public health officials worried that efforts to limit transmission of Covid could interrupt vaccination programs for other diseases, particularly in the developing world, and almost since the start of Covid-19 vaccination programs, theyve worried that rising vaccine skepticism, particularly in the United States, might permanently damage acceptance of previously routine vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella, for instance.

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Opinion | The Monster Measles Outbreak in Europe Is a Warning - The New York Times