A second child with measles has died in Texas amid a steadily growing outbreak that has infected nearly 500 people in that state alone.
The US health and human services department confirmed the death to NBC late Saturday, though the agency insisted exactly why the child died remained under investigation. On Sunday, a spokesperson for the UMC Health System in Lubbock, Texas, said that the child had been hospitalized before dying and was “receiving treatment for complications of measles” – which is easily preventable through vaccination.
The family of the child in question had chosen to not get the minor vaccinated against the illness.
Michael Board, a news reporter at Texas’s WOAI radio station, wrote on Sunday that official word from the state’s health and human services department was that the child died from “measles pulmonary failure” while having had no underlying conditions.
Citing records it had obtained, the New York Times described the child as an eight-year-old girl.
That marked the second time a child with measles had died since 26 February. The first was a six-year-old girl – also hospitalized in Lubbock – whose parents had not had her vaccinated.
The Trump administration’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, on Sunday identified the two children to have died with measles as Kayley Fehr and Daisy Hildebrand. Daisy was the one who died more recently, and Kennedy said in a statement that he traveled to her funeral on Sunday to be with her family as well as the community in its “moment of grief”.
Kennedy for years has baselessly sowed doubt about vaccine safety and efficacy. He sparked alarm in March among those concerned by the US’s measles outbreak when he backed vitamins to treat the illness and stopped short of endorsing protective vaccines, which he minimized as merely a “personal choice” rather than a safety measure that long ago was proven effective.
In his statement on Sunday, Kennedy said: “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine,” which also provides protection against mumps and rubella. He also said he would send a team to support Texas’s local- and state-level responses to the ongoing measles outbreak.
A third US person to have died after contracting measles was an unvaccinated person in Lea county, New Mexico, officials in that state announced in early March.
Dr Peter Marks, who recently resigned as the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine while attributing that decision to Kennedy’s “misinformation and lies”, blamed the US health secretary and his staff for the death of the child being buried on Sunday.
“This is the epitome of an absolute needless death,” Marks said Sunday during an interview with the Associated Press. “These kids should get vaccinated – that’s how you prevent people from dying of measles.”
Marks also told the AP that he had warned US senators that the country would endure more measles-related deaths if the Trump administration did not more aggressively respond to the outbreak. The Senate health committee has called Kennedy to testify before the group on Thursday.
One of that committee’s members is the Louisiana Republican and medical doctor Bill Cassidy, who frequently speaks about the importance of getting vaccinates against diseases but joined his Senate colleagues in voting to confirm Kennedy as the US health secretary.
Cassidy on Sunday published a statement saying: “Everyone should be vaccinated.”
There is “no benefit to getting measles”, Cassidy’s statement added. “Top health officials should say so unequivocally [before] another child dies.”
Measles, which is caused by a highly contagious, airborne virus that spreads easily when an infected person breathes, sneezes or coughs, had been declared eliminated from the US in 2000. But the virus has recently been spreading in undervaccinated communities, with Texas and New Mexico standing among five states with active outbreaks – which is defined as three or more cases.
The other states are Kansas, Ohio and Oklahoma. Collectively, as of Friday, the US had surpassed 600 measles cases so far this year – more than double the number it recorded in all of 2024. Health officials and experts have said that they expect the measles outbreak to go on for several more months at least – if not for about a year.
Texas alone was reporting 481 cases across 19 counties as of Friday, most of them in the western region of the state. It registered 59 previously unreported cases between Tuesday and Friday. There were also 14 new hospitalizations, for a total of 56 throughout the outbreak.
More than 65% of Texas’s measles cases are in Gaines county, which has a population of just under 23,000, and was where the virus started spreading in a tightly knit, undervaccinated Mennonite community.
Gaines has logged 315 cases – in just over 1% of the county’s residents – since late January.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
