In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio. A top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.
The U.S. has reported more than 1,600 cases of measles to date in 2025, the largest number of cases since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000. Effectively responding to a measles outbreak imposes significant costs on national and state governments, healthcare providers, and society. The scale of these costs depends largely on the size of the outbreak, complicating economic calculations and making budgetary planning difficult. New research from the Economics & Finance team at the International Vaccine Access Center (IVAC) expands on previous costing research to quantify the costs of these outbreaks and better estimate how costs scale with outbreak size.
Researchers performed a systematic review to examine the cost of measles outbreaks in 18 states between 2000–2025. They found that the average cost per case was approximately $43,000, ranging from just under $7,000 to more than $243,000. This variation is the result of several factors, including the state the outbreak occurs in, the number of cases in the outbreak, and the number of contacts. Small outbreaks generally have a higher cost per case due to the high fixed expenditures required (e.g., surveillance, measles testing systems, communication systems, and labor mobilization), while large outbreaks have higher overall costs with a smaller cost per case.
A more useful metric may be the fixed cost of a measles outbreak, or the initial costs incurred at the beginning of a measles outbreak regardless of its size. Even a single case of measles triggers an outbreak response and therefore incurs a large initial fixed cost, including case investigation, contact tracing, quarantine, and vaccination. Beyond the initial fixed costs of a rapid health response, incremental costs continue to scale as an outbreak expands. In this systematic review, researchers estimated the fixed cost of a measles outbreak to be $244,480.40, with an incremental cost of $16,197.13 for each additional measles case. Based on recent evidence, using these figures, an outbreak of five measles cases could be expected to cost $325,466.05, while an outbreak of 50 measles cases is estimated to cost $1,054,336.90.
