It's the Brian Lairn Show.

I'm producer Amina Serna, filling in for Brian today.

Good morning again, everyone.

Now we're going to take a look at the biggest measles outbreak in the United States in more than 20 years.

For decades, the U.S. has held what's known as measles elimination status.

That designation was granted in 2000, and it doesn't mean measles disappeared entirely.

It just means the virus wasn't spreading

continuously in the country for more than one year. But that status might be in jeopardy.

Over the past year, over 2,200 people have been infected and three people have died. Those are the

first measles deaths in the United States in a decade.

This resurgence comes amid several overlapping shifts. Childhood vaccination rates have fallen

nationwide since the pandemic, driven in part by rising vaccine skepticism. At the same time,

the federal government has cut billions of dollars

in public health funding used to track infectious diseases and respond to outbreaks. And earlier this

month, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced major changes to the childhood

vaccination schedule, reducing the number of routine vaccines from

17 to 11. Apora Mandelavi covers science and global health for the New York Times, and she's

joining us now to help understand this current measles outbreak and how we got here. Welcome to WMIC, Apurva. Always a

pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. First, can you tell us about how bad this past year

has been compared to previous years? How many more cases are we seeing? We've seen so many more cases

than we normally do. As you mentioned, there have been 2,200 cases in

2025, and that's the most cases we'd seen in about 30 years since the 1990s. And so that in

...