‘It’s really scary’
According to the state Department of Health Services, the measles outbreak in Wisconsin has so far been confined to Grant, Iowa, Lafayette and Vernon counties, with 234 confirmed and six probable cases as of Oct. 6.
Everyone in Meghan Carey’s life knows that her fourth and second graders, who attend public school in Madison, are vaccinated. She’s proud of that and wishes all parents would follow suit, especially given the recent outbreak of measles in southwestern Wisconsin, and in pockets around the country.
“I know they are protected to the best of our ability of what we can handle,” Carey says of her two children. “But it's really scary. It’s scary knowing that they are interacting daily with kids and potentially adults who might not be vaccinated and are putting not just them, but our larger community at risk, especially families who have children who are unable to do vaccinations due to medical reasons.” As a parent, Meghan’s number one public health concern is "vaccines.” Karilyn Stampfli, a health services coach with the Madison school district, says the district has not heard much concern about measles from parents, even with the recent outbreak in southwest Wisconsin.
But, she adds in an email, the district continues “to monitor measles activity in our state and surrounding communities" and is prepared to respond to measles and other transmissible diseases. “Our schools and district health services staff routinely plan and prepare for a range of potential health-related situations, including infectious disease outbreaks, and would work closely with our public health partners to respond appropriately should a case or outbreak affect our school community.” According to a 2025-2026 report from Public Health Madison & Dane County, Dane County has a higher vaccination rate than statewide, with more than 90% of students meeting the minimum immunization requirements for the 2025-2026 school year.
Dane County’s MMR (measles mumps and rubella) vaccination rate, according to data from 192 schools, is 95.9%. The measles outbreak in Wisconsin has so far been confined to Grant, Iowa, Lafayette and Vernon counties, with 234 confirmed and six probable cases as of Oct. 6, according to the Department of Health Services website .
In all, there have been 258 cases in Wisconsin in 2026, with no reported cases in Dane County or in the city of Madison. Nearly all cases are from unvaccinated individuals, resulting in five hospitalizations but no deaths. Normally, children need to be at least 1 year old to get their first dose of the MMR vaccine to protect against measles.
The second dose isn’t typically given until a child is at least 4. Based on need, or concerns of travel or outbreaks, parents can elect to vaccinate their child as young as 6 months, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics . The academy also notes that infants under 12 months are at the greatest risk of severe illness from measles.
Dan Marlin, a Madison resident, has two children, a 1-year-old and a 5-year-old. Both are vaccinated. Given the risk from measles, Marlin wonders about giving his youngest child the second dose of the MMR earlier than is typical.
The family likes to travel and be out around the city. “We don’t want to just be at home all the time.” According to DHS data, between 2020 and 2025 the vaccination rates for 2-year-olds in Dane County who received the recommended child and immunization series, which includes the MMR vaccine, remained around 75-76%.
The rates in nearby counties were much lower: Grant (47.8%), Iowa (66.4%), Lafayette (48.1%), and Vernon (32.2%). Public health officials note one improvement: Wisconsin’s kindergarten vaccination rates for measles, mumps and rubella, according to an annual report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have slightly increased from the previous year of 2024-2025 from 84.8% to 85.1%.
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“While this is a positive step,” the Wisconsin Department of Health noted in a press release , “that rate remains well below the 95% level that is generally needed to prevent measles from spreading in a community.” Earlier this year a new group debuted in Wisconsin. Wisconsin Families for Vaccines is the state chapter of the American Families for Vaccines Action Fund.
“We are primarily focused on mobilizing parents and families to advocate for science-based vaccine policy at the state level,” says Hannah Sorensen, director of the statewide group. The group also collects stories from individuals about why vaccination is important (two ran as op-eds in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ) and hold such events as a Q&A with the Academy Award-nominated filmmaker, Scott Hamilton Kennedy, behind the new documentary, Shot in the Arm .
Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, professor of pediatrics and human development of family studies at UW-Madison, says that the increase in measles cases in Wisconsin and nationwide is “not a surprise.” “We’ve seen this possibility coming for a very long time,” he tells Isthmus . Anti-vaccination movements, he adds, have been around for a while.
“To most pediatricians vaccine hesitancy is actually not new.” What is new, Navsaria says, is the strength of the message. Anti-vaccination rhetoric is getting more air time on social media and it’s being amplified by people in positions of authority, including celebrities and public officials.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for instance, recently suggested a measles death was possibly “fabricated.” Navsaria says that broadly there are two groups of folks who reject vaccines: one that doesn’t interact with the health care system due to cultural and societal reasons, and another that does.
“That’s one of the interesting paradoxes here. Someone will bring their child to see me and I will diagnose an ear infection. And if advised to do antibiotics, they will generally say yes.” But “the very safe option of doing immunization is often questioned because of the language of the myths and disinformation,” says Navsaria, who notes that there is a higher risk of a reaction to an antibiotic than there is to an immunization.
Navsaria says many have argued that immunizations have given children a childhood. Before the vaccine was created in 1963, nearly all children got measles by the age of 15 while around 500 died each year and nearly 50,000 were hospitalized. The disease was first nationally reported in 1912; in the decade after, around 6,000 deaths occurred annually.
Over time, the creation and implementation of a measles vaccine, and the public trust to take the vaccine, almost erased deaths and hospitalizations in the U.S. The number of measles-associated deaths of children and adults in both 2025 and 2026 is the most since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000 .
Unvaccinated children attending Dane County schools — private or public — are required by law to get a vaccination waiver; the number of waivers granted is on the rise in the county and statewide. Nearly 8% of Wisconsin students and about 4% of Dane County students got a waiver for at least one vaccine, according to the 2025-2026 report from Public Health Madison & Dane County.
Personal conviction waivers are the most common type of aivers. Nearly 1% of students waived all vaccines. “While still low,” the report read, “the percent of students that waived in all vaccines in Dane County almost doubled from 2021-2022 to 2025-2026.” On Sept.
23, on the Short Wave science podcast from National Public Radio, immunologist and epidemiologist Michael Mina , who has been studying measles for 15 years, expressed doubt that the current epidemic will go away. “On the one hand, we’ll see outbreaks. And if they get big enough, they have the opportunity to burn themselves out.
That’s natural herd immunity. Do we want that? We don’t want that,” Mina said.
Mina says that new strategies must be implemented to rebuild trust in science and vaccines. “Should we just keep beating the same drum and just hoping that, somehow, it reverses? No.
And should we ridicule and criticize people who don't get vaccines because they truly don't know and they love their kids? No. We have to think of new approaches to reach consensus, to rebuild trust.”
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