Measles is making a comeback with global cases jumping 79% in 2023, major outbreaks occurred in 2024-2025, and continuing into 2026, threatening many countries’ long-standing years of almost complete measles elimination. Over 90% of these cases occurred in non-vaccinated victims.

Ever since vaccines were introduced in the late 18th century, they have tremendously changed the world. They shifted medicine from treatment to prevention, saved millions and millions of lives, boosted global health, and led to huge drops in diseases such as mumps, diphtheria, and, ironically…measles. However, whenever something is just too good to be true, humans like to find problems with it. And in the past couple of decades, the revolutionary vaccine has been faulted with links to autism or “fake immunity,” resulting in a steady decline of its usage, especially in young children. People should stop believing the stream of fabricated information on vaccines from social media or political leaders, and shouldn’t use their religious beliefs to get in the way of their own or their child’s safety.

The leading cause of the lack of vaccinations is what people hear on social media. Looking at the trends, as the usage of social media continues to increase, the lack of vaccinations is parallel with it. People choose to believe TikToks from those who were probably sitting in their room bored or wanting a shot to be a suck-up to a random guy on TV, and never even flipped a page of a book on how vaccinations work, over the scientists and doctors who work with them every day. And by the way, the random guy’s biggest experience with the medical field is his ongoing health issues. But no…believe him over the 95% trained professionals (with a decade-long medical degree) that say vaccines have no direct causation with mental health issues and that they are strongly recommended.

Another reason for the decline in vaccines is due to people’s own personal or religious beliefs. Some say that it doesn’t purify the body, others think they should only have the “natural immunity” that God gifted them, and some go so far as to believe in “spiritual healing.” So after all of this, I wonder why in the measles outbreak of 1713-1714 there was a 45% fatality rate. They should have just used “spiritual immunity.” Silly them. I know how important religion is to people, and I am not saying they should stop believing in it. But if it starts to hurt them or their families, then is it really worth it? I understand if an 18+ individual would not like to get vaccinated themselves, because by then they are an adult and they are free to make their own decisions. But they shouldn’t stop their children from getting them, because their bodies are growing, and instilling these bad habits in them from an early age and a lack of awareness could lead to them having detrimental health issues when they are older, if not now.

The increase in measles over the past couple of years has been from listening to social media as if it were a doctor with 25+ years of experience, and using one’s own religious beliefs to stop them from getting vaccinated. It’s sad to see that after the years of advancements our generation has made with the invention of the vaccine to save millions upon millions of lives over the past years, we are now going backwards once again. We can’t go back to the way things were, epidemic after epidemic, deaths upon deaths, and there is a simple solution to prevent this from happening. Stop listening to the lies and get vaccinated.