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Tom Cowan
August 14, 2025
I’d like to comment on the alleged measles outbreak in Texas, and I would like to frame my comments as if I were the HHS Secretary. In doing so, I have three basic intentions. The first is simply that I think it’s important to try to get the truth out as best as I know it. Secondly, because the official measles narrative doesn’t seem to offer anything but a full-on, pro-vaccine response, it’s my hope that more accurate information can help the current HHS Secretary find another way out of the dilemma. Thirdly— and this is something that I talk about a lot—we don’t need a government response. For most things (and maybe for everything), a government response just messes things up! It’s more of a superstition than anything else.
As a private individual who is not part of the government, I’m describing the situation as I see it so that people can figure out what to do without government intervention. If we understand that we don’t need government to tell us what to do when something like a measles outbreak allegedly happens, then we can create an effective response that doesn’t depend on government.
What we’ve heard is that there is a measles outbreak in Texas. Children are getting sick, and public health officials are blaming it on the unvaccinated Mennonite community. We’re also told that uptake for measles vaccines has declined from the 97 or 98 percent level that officials say is optimal to something like 78 percent, and supposedly that is the fuel for this outbreak. Additionally, officials allege that one or possibly two Texas children have died as a result of measles.
Let’s try to unpack those claims a bit. I like to start at the beginning and ask, “What is measles?” The answer that health officials will give is that measles is a childhood illness (meaning an illness that happens in children) caused by an RNA measles virus that produces a certain set of symptoms that are sometimes harmless and sometimes dangerous. They also give rates for the percentage of children who come down with measles, the percentage who have complications like ear infections and pneumonia, and the percentage of children who allegedly die from measles.
Is it true that measles is a specific clinical entity? Or, to put that question even more simply, “Is there actually a specific disease called measles?” The CDC is supposed to be the definitive word on this. So, what is the CDC’s exact definition of a measles case? In other words, according to CDC, how do we know that a person has “measles” as opposed to some other illness?
The CDC case definition for measles says that it is an acute illness characterized by a generalized, maculopapular rash (that means “red and bumpy”) that lasts three or more days, with a temperature greater than or equal to 101˚F or 38.3˚C, and cough, coryza (basically, a runny nose) or conjunctivitis (meaning inflammation of the eyes).¹ CDC says that it classifies a case as “probable” measles “[i]n the absence of a more likely diagnosis” if the illness “meets the clinical description with no epidemiologic linkage to a laboratory-confirmed measles case and noncontributory or no measles laboratory testing.”
Where there is an “acute febrile rash illness,” the CDC says that “confirmed” cases require one of the following:
- Isolation of measles virus from a clinical specimen
- Detection of specific nucleic acids using a PCR test
- Testing for “IgG seroconversion or a significant rise in measles immunoglobulin G antibody” (using molecular diagnostic tests claiming that the antibodies confirm that it’s measles)
- Use of a positive serologic test for measles immunoglobulin M antibody
- A “direct epidemiologic linkage to a case confirmed by one of the methods above”
The first and most important thing I want to get across is that there is no way to tell by looking at a child whether or not the child has something called measles. In fact, in Western medicine’s catalog of childhood diseases, there are half a dozen or more supposedly distinct conditions that all happen to have symptoms essentially identical to the clinical description of “measles.” This raises an obvious question: When a child has a rash that covers a lot of their body, a temperature of around 103˚F to 105˚F, a cough, a runny nose and eye inflammation, how are we supposed to know whether it is “measles,” “roseola,” “Fifth disease” or another reportedly separate condition with virtually the same symptom profile?
The point that I’m making (and this has been verified in many studies) is that if you show a child with these types of symptoms to a range of experienced pediatricians, they will not be able to come to an agreement on whether the child has “measles” or some other “virus-caused disease.” In fact, I can remember sitting through dermatology lectures in medical school that presented us with slides of children with these apparently discrete illnesses and thinking, “I don’t get it.”
In short, there is no way to definitively diagnose “measles” based on symptoms alone, and the CDC says as much. According to CDC, the best you can do is describe what is happening and say, “this may be measles,” but you cannot make a definitive diagnosis solely on the basis of a physical examination or visual inspection of the child because, from Western medicine’s standpoint, it could also be one of seven to ten other childhood illnesses that it has inventoried but which are clinically indistinguishable from what medicine calls “measles.”
If we go by the CDC’s own definition, “confirming” that an illness is “measles” and not something else requires that someone either isolate the measles virus, find pieces of the genome of the measles virus, detect antibodies to the measles virus or have an “epidemiologic linkage” to another case “confirmed” using one of those molecular detection methods.
For the moment, I’m going to ignore the fact that the measles virus has never been isolated based on the actual definition of “isolation,” which is “to separate one thing from all other things.” For the sake of my argument here, I’ll temporarily assume there is a virus, even though we know that there isn’t. I’m not going to go into that further because I’ve done that talk with Drs. Sam and Mark Bailey, Dr. Andrew Kaufman and Christine Massey. Many people have explained the lack of evidence for a measles virus.
I’ll also momentarily ignore the fact that the early studies done by Enders (and by others) disproved the “isolation with cell culture” technique as being valid for the detection or isolation of a virus. Enders even admitted that he got the same result whether he added something from a measles patient or added nothing to his cell culture.
Let’s forget about all that for a minute and ask, “What is required for a test to be considered valid for diagnostic purposes?” For a “surrogate test” (meaning a test that measures a surrogate endpoint thought to correlate with a clinical endpoint) to be used to diagnose a specific condition, it must be compared to a so-called “gold standard,” meaning a situation where you know with 100 percent certainty what the real diagnosis is. If you can compare your surrogate test to the gold standard, you can find out the false positive and the false negative rate. If you don’t have a gold standard—a 100 percent validated test—you can never find the false positive or false negative rate, and, therefore, it can never be a valid test.
Let me give you an example to make that very clear. With pregnancy, you can take one hundred women who you know are pregnant. You could even wait and see if the baby comes out, or you could see the hands, feet and head on an ultrasound at four or six months. Then, you could do a molecular detection test for certain “hormone” levels or “immunoglobulin” levels or whatever you want and compare the two and see how often they match. If the molecular detection test is positive in ninety-nine out of one hundred of those women, then you know you have a test with a 1 percent false negative rate. Then you can safely and accurately use that test, and you can tell women, “One out of one hundred times, the test will tell you that you are not pregnant when, in fact, you are, but 99 percent of the time, if the test says you are pregnant, you can rest assured that you are pregnant.”
At the same time, you have to do a false positive assessment. That means, for example, that you take one hundred men and do the same test; if three of them are positive, then you know you have a 3 percent false positive rate. You can tell people, “I did this test, and 3 percent of the time it says you’re pregnant when you can’t possibly be pregnant.” Then, you can use the test in a clinical setting.
In the measles example, here is the question that you would have to ask: “What is the test that gives me 100 percent certainty that I am dealing with a case of measles?” Think about that for a minute. We already know that a generalized rash and a temperature, cough, runny nose and red eyes are entirely nonspecific and cannot diagnose for sure that somebody has “measles.”
Now, remember that CDC defines a “probable” case of measles as an illness that “meets the clinical description with no epidemiologic linkage to a laboratory-confirmed measles case and noncontributory or no measles laboratory testing.” (I would note that it’s circular reasoning to talk about “no epidemiologic linkage” to a lab-confirmed measles case, because if a lab can’t confirm that there’s measles, an “epidemiologic linkage” is meaningless.) “Noncontributory or no measles laboratory testing” means that you’re back to the clinical description— even though we know that it cannot differentiate between “measles,” “roseola,” “Fifth disease” or six or seven other so-called conditions that we are assured exist and are distinct.
Given that the CDC is referring us back to the unhelpful clinical description, there is no way to get a false positive or a false negative rate on any of its molecular detection techniques. In other words, even using the CDC’s own framework, their molecular detection tests cannot be valid for the detection of a specific disease because there is no gold standard with which to compare them that allows you to be able to say that you know the error rate. A test without an error rate is an unscientific assessment that has no validity at all and should never be used.
Think about it—if you go to the doctor and he does an antibody test and says, “You have measles,” how do you know that you actually have measles? Before the advent of the molecular detection tests, the only way that anybody could say that you had “measles” was to rely on the clinical description, but the CDC’s about-face says that a clinical description cannot furnish a specific diagnosis. This means that there is no gold standard, which means that the molecular detection tests are not valid tests, which in turn means that they can’t tell you whether someone has “measles.” A measles diagnosis is essentially a house of cards.
Let me pause to note that anyone who says that the measles vaccine was responsible for decreasing the measles death rate is basically either lying or hasn’t looked at the U.S. vital statistics data. Figure 1, which shows the decline in measles deaths from 1900 to 1970, very convincingly illustrates that the widespread use of the measles vaccine in the United States in 1968 did nothing to change the death rate, because the death rate was already essentially zero.
However, I would encourage you to ask a different question: “Before molecular detection techniques became available in 1960 or so, how did we know that any of these people actually had something called measles?” The CDC and other authoritative sources have told us in their own words that a clinical assessment cannot distinguish “measles” from other diseases that they tell us exist. So, how do we know that Figure 1 actually reflects an illness called measles? And how can we know that the vaccine decreased the number of measles cases when, prior to the advent of molecular detection techniques (taking health officials on their own terms), we had no way to assess who had measles and who didn’t? Then, factor in what I’ve explained about the molecular detection techniques’ inability to serve as valid tests— because there is no gold standard and thus no way to calculate an error rate. Without an idea of how often such tests are right or wrong, the tests are not usable. Again, even on medicine’s own terms, we can have no idea at all what the relationship of measles vaccination might be to the incidence of so-called “measles” or to any other illness or the death rate.
Figure 2, showing the decline in measles deaths in England and Wales from 1838 to 1970, reflects the same pattern observed in the U.S. By the time the measles vaccine was introduced in 1968, there was already a 99.8 percent decrease in the measles death rate. Again, however, we run into the same problem. How did they know—in 1838 or 1843 or 1903—that the disease they entered into their vital statistics was “measles” versus “roseola” or six or seven other types of rashes that medicine tells us are distinct entities (all of which were in vogue at the time)?
There is an obvious bottom line. In the absence of a definitive clinical diagnosis of “measles” and a definitive test for “measles,” there is no evidence that a distinct illness called “measles” actually exists. And now we can bring back into the picture the fact that a measles-causing virus has never been isolated, found or purified. Again, the isolation technique developed by Enders actually disproved that they isolated the virus! If you’ve never had the pure virus, how do you know that a piece of it (the genetic material) actually came from the virus? The answer is, you don’t. And how can you know that an antibody directed against the proteins of a virus that you never found are specific to that virus? The answer is, you can’t. In short, for a number of reasons, all of the molecular detection tests are basically bogus. Children may experience slightly different permutations of rash, but even if we operate within the CDC’s framework, none of their molecular diagnostics can possibly confirm a specific illness called “measles” or any other supposed viral illness.
The science of this is clear, obvious and easy to understand. Any normal person thinking this through will come to the same conclusions. So, why do the CDC and Texas health department claim that they are seeing an outbreak of measles?
One reason is that when assessing an outbreak of children with a rash, fever and runny nose, the CDC automatically says they don’t have measles if they’ve had an MMR or measles vaccine—because they say the vaccine works. This means that the only children they do the tests and clinical assessments on are children who are unvaccinated, and some of those children will probably test “positive” because it’s a nonspecific test of tissue breakdown or goodness knows what. Thus, measles becomes a disease of the unvaccinated because those are the only children tested. If that isn’t a definition of circular reasoning, I don’t know what is! This is all based on the inability to understand logic.
If the only children you test are unvaccinated children and then you say, “Oh my God, it’s only the unvaccinated that get it,” that’s nonsense! But that is what allows officials to claim that these “outbreaks” are confined to the unvaccinated, because—wink, wink—those are the only children they test.
If we take the CDC at its word and accept the fact that before the advent of molecular detection tests there was no way to accurately diagnose measles, then all of the historical data on incidence and changing rates of measles are obviously bogus. Even if we were to accept that something called measles exists, without a way to know who had it and who didn’t, there would have been no way to assess changes in the measles rate over time. Essentially, “measles” is a fake diagnosis engineered to finger the unvaccinated. It’s a scam to blame the unvaccinated because some children are getting sick.
If I were the HHS Secretary, how would I respond to the situation in Texas? First, I would challenge anyone who disagrees with anything I have said to come up with and present an accurate diagnosis of measles, including how they would validate that Case A is “measles” and Case B isn’t. That is the first thing that I would request from any infectious disease people who dispute my assertions.
Next, if you claim that the molecular detection tests accurately diagnose measles, I would ask you to show me a study involving perhaps one thousand children claimed to have measles, and on the basis of those tests, prove that they do, in fact, have something called measles. To do that, you would have to do the same antibody tests on children with a different set of symptoms—one thousand children who are well and one thousand children who have similar symptoms that you don’t think are measles (e.g., the conditions you call “roseola,” “Fifth disease,” “chickenpox” and so on). You would need to show that all of the different parameters—meaning the antibodies, the PCR, the IgM, the IgG, the clinical description and the epidemiology—are unique and specific and can accurately diagnose—without a shadow of a doubt—a case of measles. I have not seen that study, and I’m pretty sure that study doesn’t exist, but that should have been the first thing demanded.
In addition, before I would accept a measles diagnosis or any of these tests as being valid, I would need to see a study showing that the antibody test or the PCR differentiates between one hundred children who have measles and one hundred children with rashes that you say aren’t measles. And you would also have to do that with healthy children and, for example, with children with leukemia. You would have to prove that your tests are specific for something you call measles. Until someone comes up with that study, I don’t buy that there’s a specific clinical syndrome called measles, and I don’t buy that any of these tests can accurately diagnose measles.
I don’t want to hear that your Aunt Hilda had measles and then you got it, or something like that. I don’t want stories like that. I want accurate science that proves, using valid logic and scientific methods, that there is an entity called measles that is caused by an isolated, purified, characterized measles virus, which—by itself—has been shown to reproduce specific symptoms and can be accurately diagnosed with molecular detection techniques. The reality is that none of those things has ever been shown. If we are saying that we want to “follow the science” and “trust the science,” then we need to do good science and see the science. I don’t see it.
Florence Nightingale famously said, “The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of weak, uncultured, unstable minds, such as now rule in the medical profession. There are no specific diseases, only specific disease conditions.” In our era, however, no one will admit that what we are really talking about is just a nonspecific illness process that some children go through.
In terms of what I would do for a child experiencing acute illness of this kind, there is some interesting historical information showing that children do well when they are well cared for and well fed, and, in particular, when they have adequate animal fats. Some people would call that vitamin A, but I even question the existence of vitamin A and whether that’s actually the “active ingredient.” If I were to admit or claim that it’s vitamin A, then someone might want to give children some sort of synthetic vitamin A, and I don’t think that is a good idea. Every child who has symptoms of this type of acute illness should be given a teaspoon of cod liver oil and a liberal amount of grass-fed raw butter or a similarly high-quality beef tallow or lard from pigs that were able to forage out in the sun. That should be a great help to support them in overcoming the symptoms that they have.
If more support is needed, I would go to a doctor or practitioner who has studied the New Biology principles. We could look at using slightly more aggressive techniques to help children with the detoxification process of an acute illness, using things like chlorine dioxide and liposomal vitamin C. Those are simple things that pretty much anyone can do at home, and they should make it so that no child has any bad outcomes from this process that they’re going through.
I welcome anyone who questions my statements to send me studies proving what the syndrome of measles is, proving that the molecular detection techniques are valid (including all the parameters that I mentioned) and showing me what the gold standard is. Absent that kind of proof, I would say that I’m correct. There is no proven illness called “measles.” There is no evidence of any virus causing this supposed illness. The tests and evaluation techniques are clearly bogus and are essentially meant to pin blame on the unvaccinated because, again, those are the only people being tested.
REFERENCE
- National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System. Measles/rubeola 2013 case definition. CDC, reviewed Apr. 16, 2021. https://ndc.services.cdc.gov/case-definitions/measles-2013/
This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Summer 2025
Source: https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/texas-measles-outbreak-2025/#gsc.tab=0
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