Falling vaccine rates could mean millions of measles cases: Study

[nitpicked]

1. From the Stanford Medicine PR

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/04/measles-vaccination.html

(snip)

Kiang: If vaccination were to fall by even 10% today, measles cases would skyrocket to 11.1 million over the next 25 years. If vaccination rates were cut in half, we’d expect 51.2 million cases of measles, 9.9 million cases of rubella, 4.3 million cases of polio and 200 cases of diphtheria over 25 years. This would lead to 10.3 million hospitalizations and 159,200 deaths, plus an estimated 51,200 children with post-measles neurological complications, 10,700 cases of birth defects due to rubella and 5,400 people paralyzed from polio. Measles would become endemic in less than five years, and rubella would become endemic in less than 20. Under these conditions, polio became endemic in about half of simulations in around 20 years.

What differences did you find at the state level?

Kiang: Massachusetts has high vaccination rates and was consistently low risk. Both California and Texas were higher risk, even after accounting for larger population size, because vaccination rates in both have dropped and there’s a lot of travel to those states. Our model assumed there was no spillover of infections across state lines, so the numbers could be an underestimate.
(snip)