Utah becomes center of latest measles outbreak in US

Utah has become the latest epicenter for measles transmission in the U.S., going down a similar path to Texas’s outbreak last year, where a small under-vaccinated pocket within the state fueled widespread transmission. 

While the measles outbreak in South Carolina came to end last month, Utah has become the country’s new hotspot.

As of this week, the Utah Department of Health and Human Services has confirmed 441 cases of measles in 2026, more than twice the number of cases that were reported last year. This accounts for roughly a quarter of the 1,814 total cases that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have confirmed this year. 

A significant portion of the measles cases have been linked to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), an insular, fundamentalist religious community in which vaccination rates have historically been low. That’s similar to the pattern in Texas, where a majority of initial cases in last year’s outbreak originated from a Mennonite community in the state’s western region.

In Utah, just 78.5 percent of public-school kindergartners in the 2023-2024 school year had been vaccinated for the measles, much lower than 95 percent, which is the ideal vaccination rate to hold off a measles outbreak.

In general, vaccination rates have fallen across the United States, to 92.5 percent nationally in the 2024-2025 school year among kindergarteners.

In Utah’s Southwest Health District, where the vaccine-hesitant FLDS community is situated, the vaccine exemption rate for kindergarteners in the 2024-2025 school year was nearly 20 percent. 

The situation has reached the point where the state’s health........

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