Bad Measles Math: Cherry-Picked CDC Charts Used to Minimize U.S. Outbreak
By John Gregory
What happened: Accounts with large followings on X, Facebook, and YouTube are misrepresenting federal data to portray the ongoing measles outbreak in the U.S. as nothing out of the ordinary.
A closer look: Some commentators shared a chart (below) based on yearly measles case data reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), showing that 2025 measles cases did not surpass totals reported in 2024, 2019, 2018, or 2014.
Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, a Houston-based ear, nose, and throat specialist who has frequently advanced false claims about COVID-19 vaccines, posted the chart on March 9, 2025, and stated, “Outbreak? Or political propaganda.” The post generated 395,000 views and 13,000 likes in eight days.
Comedian and podcast host Jimmy Dore said in a March 12, 2025, YouTube video that attracted 101,000 views that there was “hysteria right now that’s being manufactured by the media” about measles, pointing to the chart to back his argument: “So just over a thousand [measles cases] in 2019 … and here we are right now, 222. So what are they talking about?”
The same chart was shared on X by the official account of the COVID-19 conspiracy documentary “Died Suddenly,” which has 818,000 followers, and to the 164,000 Facebook followers of Kevin Steele, a former news anchor for Beaumont, Texas, ABC affiliate KMBT.
Actually: The chart has a major flaw — it is comparing 12 months’ worth of measles cases in other years to less than three months of 2025 data.
Indeed, the most recent CDC update said that as of March 13, 2025, 301 measles cases have been reported in 14 states — already more than what was reported in all of 2024.
Since measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, no other year has recorded this many cases this early in the year, according to a NewsGuard review of CDC data archived from the agency’s website. An unvaccinated child died in Texas in the first U.S. measles death in 10 years, officials said. (The spike in measles cases in 2019 was largely driven by an outbreak among Orthodox Jewish communities in New York.)