A Measles Outbreak Brings With It Echoes of the Pandemic

In South Carolina, parents struggle to deal with infections that have brought quarantines and remote learning. Health care workers are bracing for an increase in cases.

Late-night emails sent to parents informing them that someone in their child’s classroom has been infected with measles. Pediatricians fielding calls from concerned mothers about the vaccination status of their children. An anxious father running into the waiting room of a hospital, a sick baby in his arms, asking for help.

What began in the fall as a trickle of measles infections in Spartanburg County, S.C., has since grown into an outbreak that has sickened more than 110 people, prompted more than 250 residents to quarantine and unsettled many more. Across the upstate region of South Carolina, a conservative stronghold where both the manufacturing industry and the population has boomed in recent years, many families have felt familiar echoes of the pandemic this week.

Some children who were near infected classmates have resorted to remote learning, with adults calling out from work to take care of them. Frustrations about the length of quarantines are bubbling up in the community. And national divisions over the efficacy of vaccines that deepened during the pandemic have remained as pertinent as ever, with many in Spartanburg still resistant to vaccinations, especially those meant for their children.

As pediatric hospitals brace for cases to rise, health officials are working to inform families that the vaccine for measles, a virus that was declared eliminated from the United States more than two decades ago, is safe and effective.

“There’s a moment in any kind of outbreak when the temperature sort of changes, and parents’ questions and concerns shift from curiosity to fear,” said Dr. Justin Moll, a pediatrician and the founder of Parkside Pediatrics, which serves families in the Spartanburg area. “At the same time, the clinicians move from being watchful to much more vigilant.”

That pivotal moment, he said, materialized this month.

Health officials had already been monitoring the spread of measles in pockets across the country. Nationally, more than 1,900 measles cases have been reported so far this year, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Three unvaccinated people, including two children, have died.

But the latest rise in South Carolina cases has deeply concerned health officials who worry that the holiday season, a time for family gatherings, may further spread an already highly contagious disease, especially among children.

Linda Bell, the state epidemiologist, noted this week that travel around Thanksgiving had most likely contributed to the current rise in cases.

The disruptions from the outbreak, which started in October, have been significant, even for those who are not sick. For instance, unvaccinated people exposed to the virus have been asked to quarantine for 21 days; some students have had to do so twice already.

“That’s a significant amount of time,” Dr. Bell said in a news conference. “Vaccination continues to be the best way to prevent the disruption that measles is causing to people’s education, to employment.”

In the 2024-25 school year, about 90 percent of students in Spartanburg County had all of the required childhood immunizations, including the measles, mumps and rubella shot, commonly known as the M.M.R. vaccine. That’s slightly below the national average and below the 95 percent target that experts consider necessary to stem the spread of measles.

The level of worry in Spartanburg, though, appears to be correlated with whether or not one believes in the general efficacy of vaccines, an “anti-vax” notion that has been spearheaded in part by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s health secretary.

In interviews on Friday, some residents dismissed the rise in measles as an overblown problem.

“It’s not really an outbreak,” said Tim Johnson, a native of Belarus who immigrated to the United States 10 years ago. “We have to be careful about what we do and who we’re with, but not everything is worth looking into.”

For new parents, though, the outbreak has been profoundly unnerving, partly because newborns typically receive their first dose of the M.M.R. vaccine when they turn 1, and their second dose at age 4. Some families with children in those age brackets have felt pressured to speed up the vaccination process, however slightly. Pediatricians say doing so is generally considered safe, with approval from a doctor.

Marissa Grush, 32, of Greenville County, said she had been keeping a close eye on news about local measles cases in recent months. As the outbreak began to intensify in neighboring Spartanburg, she felt concerned about her nearly 1-year-old son because he spent time around other children in day care, and she was unsure about their vaccination status.

“I felt nervous and a little angry that there was the outbreak going around, and I would have to choose to vaccinate him early because others weren’t vaccinating,” Ms. Grush said.

Her son received his first dose of the vaccine in October, she said.

Natalie Shamblen, a clinical researcher and the mother of two boys, was in a similar bind. Her youngest is 1. And her oldest, at 3 years old, was a year shy of getting his second dose. After meeting with a pediatrician, she decided to get him his second dose earlier than planned.

“I think it’s really sad,” Ms. Shamblen, 36, said of the outbreak, her voice breaking. “To see children that are at risk and struggling that could be protected is — it’s just, they’re children. It’s hard to see a vulnerable population be in pain when they don’t need to be.”

Still, many have held grudges against public health officials who they believe encouraged much too stringent restrictions during the pandemic.

Speaking at a news conference this week, Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, said the state was not going to issue vaccine mandates for measles.

“We’ve been through that with Covid, and we don’t want to go in that direction,” Mr. McMaster said. “People need to understand it’s dangerous, just like a lot of other diseases. If there’s some way to prevent it, you ought to do it.”

State Senator Josh Kimbrell, a Republican who represents parts of northern Spartanburg County, said in an interview that many people, including him, believed the government overreached during the pandemic by ordering remote learning and business closures. Those decisions made people, especially conservatives, feel “distrustful of public health policy,” he said.

For some, that distrust extended to vaccines, he added. But Mr. Kimbrell has tried to persuade vaccine-skeptical constituents that the M.M.R. vaccine is safe and effective.

“The first time a constituent of mine dies because of measles, I’m going to lose my mind,” Mr. Kimbrell said, “because we should never have a person in America die of measles in 2025 because they wouldn’t take a damn vaccine.”

Teddy Rosenbluth contributed reporting.

Related Content