Ave Maria University in Florida recently had one of the biggest measles outbreaks to occur in the United States in decades, but officials told the public very little about it. Now, people are asking why?
Why are public officials so hesitant to discuss measles?
One of those people, CNN reporter Deidre McPhillips, visited Ave Maria to learn more. She went there because she had attempted to contact the Florida Department of Health and Ave Maria University by phone and email for a month and received no response.
However, even when she visited the town, she felt like people were stonewalling her. The university president reprimanded her for stopping by a town hall he was hosting for students, and refused to answer any questions about the measles outbreak.
“The university prominently identifies a contact for media inquiries on the website, but that person did not reply to any of my questions about the outbreak,” McPhillips wrote. “During my visit, she sent me an email to reiterate the university president’s message that I was not welcome on campus but also did not return my phone call after that.”
The Florida health department has also not responded to any of the calls or emails she has made over the past month.
“Visits to county health department offices had yielded new phone numbers to call, but no new calls back,” she wrote. “And for the previous two days, many local folks had met my questions about measles with a certain level of indifference and some past-tense reflections, as if the outbreak were long over.”
Lack of communication is to blame for much of the spread of measles
As of her March 23 report, Collier County, where Ave Maria is located in the southwest part of the state, has reported at least 104 cases of measles. 10% of them have come in the past two weeks.
“Most cases in the county have been concentrated among the 15-to-24 age group — which aligns with an outbreak on the university campus — but not all cases have been among college students,” she explained. “A growing share are among young children and teens.”
One expert believes local authorities’ lack of communication has hurt the public health response and likely led to more people spreading measles.
“Most jurisdictions do what they can to get the word out about measles outbreaks because they need the public’s partnership and engagement to bring the outbreak under control,” said Dr. Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Outbreak Response Innovation at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Because measles is airborne and very transmissible, there are sometimes public exposures like at the grocery store or medical clinic that need broader attention.”
So far in 2026, Florida ranks third in the United States for the most measles cases. That fact hasn’t stopped Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo from supporting the “medical freedom” movement. He has also been trying to ban mRNA vaccines in Florida and announced plans to end childhood vaccination mandates in the state.
Unvaccinated children are at the root of a record-breaking number of measles cases in the United States
In the year 2000, health officials officially declared measles eliminated in the United States. That is no longer the case.
In 2025, there were 2,065 confirmed measles cases, and there are certainly more. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) does not record jurisdictions that have failed to notify them. The last time the United States had more than 2,000 cases of measles was way back in 1992. The U.S. recorded just 285 cases in 2024. In 2025, Texas alone reported 803 cases.
It began in Gaines County, Texas, where nearly 1 in 5 incoming kindergartners in the 2023-24 school year did not get the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine. In South Carolina, the Department of Public Health blamed many of the infections on several elementary schools with largely unvaccinated students. Health officials in several other states have had to deal with measles outbreaks that have forced hundreds of unvaccinated students into quarantine.
“Communities are having to bear the price of quarantining so many children,” Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, told NBC News last October.
So far, less than three full months into 2026, the CDC has recorded 1,487 measles cases. That is already the second-highest amount of measles cases since the disease was deemed eliminated in the United States.