Is It Safe to Fly With My Baby During a Measles Outbreak?

I am flying from Vancouver to Palm Springs with my five-month-old next week. However, the various measles outbreaks in the U.S. and Canada are making me question whether I should cancel my trip. My partner thinks I’m being overly anxious/cautious.
—Anonymous

These measles outbreaks are both scary and very frustrating. The measles vaccine has been widely used for many decades and has been shown to be extremely safe. Perhaps billions of doses have been given. It’s also an example of an incredibly effective vaccine — in the range of 95% protection after a single dose (typically given at 1 year old) and 99% after two doses (second dose at age 4). It’s hard to understand the resistance to vaccination in this environment, but overall vaccination rates for routine childhood illnesses have declined considerably post-COVID.

For people with older children, this is not a personally challenging situation, because once your child is vaccinated, they are extremely well protected against measles, so there is relatively little to worry about with exposure. The group for whom this has felt the most difficult are parents of kids under 1 — like yours — where they are not yet protected by a vaccine.

However: it is very important to keep the numbers in perspective. The CDC has reported fewer than 50 cases in the U.S. overall, and there are 330 million people here. The chance that your child is exposed to measles on this trip is really vanishingly small — much smaller than many of the other risks you are implicitly taking by, say, driving to the airport.

So: while I wish we could encourage everyone to be vaccinated, since there are great reasons to do it and little reason not to, I am with your partner that it is overly cautious to cancel the trip for this reason.