The Analytic Garden

Generated by Gemini Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine at a large scale.  ~ Rudolf Virchow, 1848 I downloaded the latest data on measles cases in the US from the CDC Measles Cases and Outbreaks site on 2026-10-16. What follows is an attempt to recreate the plots on that site using R.  I retrieved the following files:   MeaslesCasesHistory.csv - cases by year from 1962 to 2026 MeaslesCasesWeekly.csv - cases for each week from 2022 to 2026  MeaslesKindergartenVaxcovExemptions.csv. - vaccinations by state for school years 2029-10 2025-26 MeaslesCasesMap.csv - cases by state and years 2024-2026. We can use MeaslesCasesWeekly to plot the cases by week. > library (tidyverse) > df_2026_10_26 <- read_csv ( "/mnt/g/measles/data/MeaslesCasesWeekly.csv" ) > head (df_2026_10_26) # A tibble: 6 × 2 week_start cases < date > < dbl > 1 2026-10-18 28 2 2026-10-11 116 3 2026-10-04 179 4 ...

  Generated by ChatGPT 5.2 On Feb. 28, 2026, I downloaded data for reported weekly US measles cases by rash onset from the CDC website  https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html  into a file named  measles_data_weekly.csv . I plotted the data using R. library (tidyverse) df_by_week <- read_csv ( "/mnt/g/measles/data/measles_data_weekly.csv" ) > head (df_by_week) # A tibble: 6 × 2 week_start cases < date > < dbl > 1 2022-01-02 0 2 2022-01-09 0 3 2022-01-16 0 4 2022-01-23 0 5 2022-01-30 1 6 2022-02-06 0 > # plot weekly data ggplot (df_by_week, aes (x = week_start, y = cases)) + geom_bar (stat = "identity" , color = 'blue' ) + labs (x = "Date" , y = "Cases" , title = "Measles Cases by Week" ) What happened in February 2025? One thing was that a new administration was in place in Washington with an  anti-vax ...