A new report suggests that the number of children vaccinated against measles globally — which declined during the Covid-19 pandemic — is nearly back to pre-pandemic levels. But the number of cases of the highly infectious disease surpassed the pre-Covid tally in 2024, according to the World Health Organization.
The annual measles assessment, published Friday in the WHO’s Weekly Epidemiological Record, is for last year. It does not touch on this year’s large ongoing measles outbreaks in the United States and Canada, which led the latter country to lose its measles-free status and left the status of the former’s measles-elimination status in doubt.
