Whooping cough cases are soaring in the United States, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as the Trump administration’s cuts to federal health agencies and funding destabilize programs that monitor disease and promote vaccination.
The U.S. has tallied 8,077 cases of whooping cough in 2025, compared with 3,847 cases in the same period last year, the CDC’s data shows. The bacterial illness, formally known as pertussis, spreads easily and is especially dangerous for infants.
Two babies in Louisiana have died of whooping cough in the past six months, while the CDC confirmed this year that a 5-year-old in Washington state died of the disease in November — the state’s first pertussis death since 2011. Two other deaths have been reported in Idaho and North Dakota, according to the British Medical Journal.
In 2024, the number of whooping cough cases in the U.S. climbed to the highest level in a decade. The latest figures show the disease’s spread continues to accelerate — and indicates that the country is backsliding in keeping children from dying of preventable diseases, said Paul Offit, an infectious-diseases physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who directs its vaccine education center.
The jump in whooping cough cases coincides with a worsening national measles outbreak, both driven in part by declining childhood vaccination rates.
“You’re already now seeing children die (of whooping cough) in states where you haven’t had a child death in years,” Offit said. “For the same reasons we’re going backward with measles, we’re going backward with pertussis.”
People of any age can become ill from pertussis, which creates a thick mucus in the windpipe and makes it hard to breathe. But the disease is especially dangerous for infants, whose airways are smaller and more fragile. Children with pertussis may cough uncontrollably, stop breathing and turn blue; when they inhale through a narrowed windpipe, it makes a whooping sound — hence the name, Offit said. The disease is sometimes called the “100-day cough” because the illness can persist for months.
“Pertussis will always be with us — even if the entire country were vaccinated, the bacteria would still be circulating,” Offit said. “The purpose of the vaccine is to keep you out of the hospital.”
Vaccination rates against whooping cough have declined since the coronavirus pandemic, according to CDC data: In 2023-2024, the vaccination rate among the nation’s kindergartners fell to 92.3%, from 94.9% four years earlier. During the same period, the percentage of kindergartners with vaccine exemptions (for both medical and nonmedical reasons) grew by 37%.
The pandemic ushered in a new era, marked by an increase in social media disinformation, that has made it harder for families to distinguish between truths and falsehoods when it comes to their health, said Sapna Singh, chief medical officer for Texas Children’s Pediatrics in Houston.
“A lot of families are getting mixed messages, and there’s a lot of confusion about the safety and efficacy of vaccines,” Singh said. “I think we have to be very compassionate in our approach because parents want the best for their children — and so do we.”
Though there are antibiotic treatments for pertussis, they’re most effective at curbing the illness’s worst effects within the first few days of exposure. That tends to be long before most parents realize their child is ill, in part because early symptoms, like runny noses and a low-grade fever, are so similar to those of the common cold or RSV.
Once a person has more severe symptoms, like a persistent cough, antibiotics can only stop the spread of the bacteria to others.
“This is where I tell families, your child will be fighting to breathe, and even supportive care will not always save a child from death,” said Singh, who advises people not to delay vaccination.
National- and state-level vaccination rates also can conceal a more complex picture at the local level, where diseases can take hold and spread, said Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs at the National Association of County and City Health Officials.
In Texas, for example, the 2023-2024 measles vaccination rate for seventh-graders (from schools that responded) was above 94%, according to data from the Texas Department of Health Services; in rural Foard County, the rate was just north of 66%. At the individual district or school level, the rates vary even more, with one Tarrant County private school showing a measles vaccination rate of 14%.
“One of the big challenges is that the infrastructure that is out there to provide not just access to vaccines but information parents are seeking has been hit with severe cuts over the past few weeks,” Casalotti said.
Among the cuts recently announced by the Trump administration was the elimination or reduction of grants to researchers who study vaccine hesitancy. Casalotti said the National Association of County and City Health Officials has been asking its members how cuts like those to the CDC and National Institutes of Health have affected their work on the ground.
“We’re hearing money is being pulled from mobile clinics, that they have to stop having extended hours for immunizations, that they’re not able to do as much or any communication around immunization,” Casalotti said. “That means parents are left without ways to make decisions for their family.”
Offit, the Philadelphia doctor, said the cuts to public health programs and decline in vaccination rates paint a troubling picture for disease control and prevention in the U.S.
“We’re taking a major step back,” he said. “I think the only way we move forward again is if we hit bottom and people say, ‘This is enough children dying.’ ”