U.S. Hits Awful Measles Record as RFK Jr.’s CDC Hides Death Totals

The U.S. is on the cusp of losing its measles elimination status.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed 5,182 measles infections nationwide Friday, the highest case load of the disease that the country has experienced since 1991. Forty-five states have been affected.

But public-facing federal datasets have not kept up with state reporting. The agency has acknowledged just four measles deaths so far this year, while Pennsylvania on its own has reported six. Health agencies in New York and Wisconsin each reported at least one additional death.

Measles hasn’t been a national concern since 2000, when the long-term use of a vaccine proved so effective at minimizing risk and exposure to the disease that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared measles eradicated from the United States. That status is up for reassessment this month. If it’s determined that a singular viral strain has circulated the country for 12 months, the U.S. will no longer qualify for the label.

The virus’s dormancy has been challenged by anti-vaxers, who have opted against medicating their children in fear that vaccinations could cause autism (a thoroughly debunked conspiracy). One such conspiracist, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has refused to combat the ensuing measles outbreak with vetted science—instead, he has issued guidance that the illness can be treated by simple vitamins.

In April, Kennedy fell short of offering a full-throated endorsement of the MMR vaccine that has historically been used to treat measles, telling CBS News that his agency was focused on finding treatments for unvaccinated individuals while falsely claiming that the jab had not been “safety tested” and was not effective for long-term prevention. As of 2025, there are no known effective treatments or cures for measles other than vaccine prevention.

The return of historically eradicated diseases is thanks to a growing movement of anti-vax parents who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of giving their children autism. The researcher who sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and vaccines, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.

But America’s is not the first measles response that Kennedy has bungled. Under Kennedy’s stewardship, the anti-vax nonprofit Children’s Health Defense had its own questionable history with the disease. Preceding a deadly measles outbreak on Samoa in 2019, the organization spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines throughout the nation, sending the island’s vaccination rate plummeting from the 60–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones. That year, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of five.

Democrats are eyeing investigations into some of America’s largest corporations that tried to curry favor with President Trump. 

The Washington Post reports that now that Democrats won back control of Congress, they are planning to probe powerful entities in Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and the first targets could be Apple, Meta, and Elon Musk and all of his companies. 

The House is already preparing to investigate how President Trump used Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, according to the Post. House Democrats are also looking at Apple’s hosting of tracking apps used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and at Meta for demanding that local governments sign nondisclosure agreements regarding data centers. 

Corporate lawyers in Washington, D.C., are scrambling to meet with corporate executives to offer advice on the impending high-profile public investigations. Many firms are preparing pitches to attract Musk as a client, as he is not only the world’s richest man, but also holds billions in government contracts, has a close relationship with Trump, and led the disastrous Department of Government Efficiency initiative.  

One lawyer at a major D.C. firm told executives in a private online meeting Thursday that “this is a new era.”

“If your company is caught up in this oversight, it’s likely to be much more highly publicized,” the lawyer said, according to the Post. 

Dozens of corporations and CEOs donated to Trump’s transition fund, his inauguration fund, and his White House ballroom project. Where that once may have protected them from regulations and investigations from the Trump administration, with this new Congress, the opposite is true. Trump also made millions investing in many companies and publicly praised companies that did him favors. 

“Lawyer up,” wrote Democratic Representative Robert Garcia, the next chair of the House Oversight Committee, in a brief statement on election night. 

Want to see just how far left the United States shifted in Tuesday’s midterm elections? Look no further.

A map produced by Ground News using data from civicAPI showed just how far each U.S. county’s margin moved from the 2024 presidential election to the 2026 House vote. A whopping 94 percent of U.S. counties shifted left in Tuesday’s midterm elections.

Jurisdictions in all 50 states reported an average 13-point shift toward Democratic House candidates. No state showed an overall shift toward the Republicans in the House, although there were a handful of districts that moved right.

The states that showed the largest shifts toward Democratic House candidates were New Jersey, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. The states that saw the smallest leftward shifts were South Dakota, Vermont, and Oregon.

The map indicated that even in states where Democratic candidates did not win, such as West Virginia, Indiana, and Kentucky, there were still heavy leftward shifts among voters.

Voters under 30 swung sharply toward the Democratic Party, according to the AP Voter Poll, a survey of more than 100,000 voters across all 50 states. Republicans appeared to lose most—if not all—of President Donald Trump’s gains with Hispanic and Black voters in 2024. Moderate and lower income voters also turned up to support Democratic candidates.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has been pushing to build artificial intelligence data centers on public lands since he first joined President Trump’s Cabinet. A Friday report from ProPublica shows that Burgum might feel so strongly about the centers not because of worries about China or the future—but because he has somewhere between $18.1 million and $64.4 million invested in artificial intelligence companies.

Burgum’s 2026 financial disclosure document shows that the vast majority of his wealth is held with Arthur Ventures, the investment firm he co-founded. While Burgum’s Senate confirmation ethics agreement forced him to resign from Arthur Ventures, he still maintained his financial interests at the firm. According to an analysis by public lands advocacy group Save Our Parks that was shared with ProPublica, Arthur Ventures invests between $18.1 million and $64.4 million in AI companies—meaning that Burgum is pushing an unpopular policy that will personally enrich him. Burgum has blamed the mass rejection of data centers on a “foreign psyop.”

The Trump administration, of course, denies ProPublica’s reporting.

“Secretary Burgum has met his federal ethics and financial disclosure obligations,” a U.S. Department of the Interior spokesperson said. “Any suggestion that his office decisions are driven by personal investments are false and completely unsupported.”

Yet Burgum isn’t the only Trump administration member who stands to personally profit from his investments in AI and data centers. According to a ProPublica review, over 380 administration members or their spouses have investments in or other financial ties to Nvidia, 320 have ties to Alphabet, and over 240 are invested in Meta Platforms—all while the administration allows states to construct data centers and inject their technology into every level of everyday life unfettered.

“Like every other goon in this administration, Data Center Doug is in it for himself,” California Representative Jared Huffman wrote online. “He wants to cover our public lands with AI data centers that will make him and Trump’s tech buddies richer.”

Dr. Amy Acton is washing her hands of Vivek Ramaswamy and his dirty campaign tactics.

Ohio’s first female governor-elect told CBS Mornings Friday that she has “no intention” of speaking to the losing Republican after he produced a disturbing political advert featuring her estranged mother.

“It was sad, I would like to say I didn’t expect this but there was no low my opponent wouldn’t sink to,” Acton said, noting that Ramaswamy’s other attack ads were filled with “lies” and “vitriol.”

“I heard that he did leave you a congratulatory phone call,” said host Gayle King. “Have the two of you spoken since election night or at all?”

“Gayle, I think we can’t normalize behavior like this. It was so beyond the pale. So I have no intention of speaking to him. I do believe that leaders’ words matter, and we need to hold folks accountable,” Acton said.

As the days ticked down to the midterm election, Ramaswamy hatched a crackpot plan to damage Acton’s credibility by weaponizing the sexual assault she suffered during her childhood against her. Ramaswamy used Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, as part of a smear campaign to paint the Ohio Democratic gubernatorial nominee as a liar.

He moved forward with the ad spot against the advice of his team, and while ignoring publicly available information demonstrating that Arthur abandoned her children to skip town with her husband—Cledith “Bud” Arthur—who was indicted for allegedly raping Acton when she was a young girl.

The biological daughter of that man lent credibility to Acton’s account of the abuse days after the smear campaign was leaked. Speaking through tears during an interview with the Daily Mail, the Youngstown, Ohio–based woman said that Arthur had also raped her late sister, Christine, years before he married Acton’s mother.

Acton has been very public about her broken family and childhood struggles. Over the years, she has discussed the horrific sexual abuse she endured from her stepfather (which she told The Youngstown Vindicator occurred between the ages of nine and 12), and also shared her experiences with homelessness in her youth. In a March 2020 profile by The Toledo Blade, Acton said that she spent one of her childhood winters living in a tent outside Youngstown.

Ramaswamy—a biotech billionaire that attended one of Ohio’s largest private high schools—saw those stories as potential political fodder, and attempted to utilize them for his own personal gain. But in doing so, he ultimately hurt himself.

The 41-year-old MAGA acolyte has since become a bit of a political pariah that is unwelcome on either the left or the right, as Democrats and Republicans alike condemned the low blow.