The state is in the midst of an outbreak, but its health department has been mostly silent.
Out of the 30 states where measles has been detected in 2026, Florida currently ranks third in case counts. Since the start of the year, at least 132 confirmed or probable cases of measles have been reported across the state, where vaccination rates have consistently fallen below the threshold required to prevent outbreaks. The measles situation in Florida is, in other words, an urgent problem for the state that the state should be urgently addressing.
But on all things measles, the state’s health department has been mostly silent. The department’s measles landing page has no map of the state’s cases and no list of vaccination sites; its “Data and Statistics” section points to measles numbers that were last updated in 2024. In the months that measles has been spreading in the state, health officials have not issued press releases about the virus or launched information campaigns to caution residents about the risks. They have not publicly advertised the benefits of vaccines. Many of Florida’s health experts remain in the dark about their own state: “There has been no—capital N, capital O—communication to physicians, in particular pediatricians, about the outbreak,” Jeffrey Goldhagen, a pediatrician at the University of Florida at Jacksonville and the former head of the Duval County health department, told me.
