08/09/2026
"Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.
'Are you feeling all right?' I asked her.
'I feel all sleepy,' she said.
In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.
The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her.
On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunized against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it....
Incidentally, I dedicated two of my books to Olivia, the first was 'James and the Giant Peach'. That was when she was still alive. The second was ‘The BFG‘, dedicated to her memory after she had died from measles. You will see her name at the beginning of each of these books. And I know how happy she would be if only she could know that her death had helped to save a good deal of illness and death among other children." -- Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl, the beloved author of classic children's books such as "Matilda" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," lost his daughter to measles in 1962. He wrote this letter as a plea to parents to have their children vaccinated, which was later published as a pamphlet by the Sandwell Health Authority, in 1988.
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More than sixty years after Roald Dahl lost Olivia, the disease that killed her is surging back across the United States -- and the man in charge of stopping it spent decades telling parents to be fearful of the vaccine that can prevent it.
This month, cornered on live television amid the worst measles outbreak in 35 years, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. finally said the words public health officials had spent a year waiting to hear. Asked directly whether parents should vaccinate their children, Kennedy said they should: the measles vaccine, he acknowledged, is safe and "stops measles in about 97% of the cases."
It was a stunning reversal. For two decades, Kennedy was one of the most influential anti-vaccine activists in the country, and the measles vaccine was at center of his crusade. He built his movement on the claim that vaccines cause autism -- a link drawn from a single 1998 study that was later retracted as fraudulent, its author stripped of his medical license, and disproven by large studies many times over. Kennedy promoted it anyway -- for years.
His campaign did not soften when he took office, even as children began to die. After the first measles death of his tenure -- an unvaccinated six-year-old girl in Texas, in February 2025 -- he called the outbreaks "not unusual" and declined to recommend the vaccine, describing it as a matter of "personal choice." He told a national television audience that the measles shot "kills people every year" and "causes blindness and deafness" -- both false. He suggested it contained "aborted fetal cells." And he steered families toward vitamin A instead, an unproven remedy that sent a cluster of unvaccinated Texas children to the hospital with vitamin A poisoning.
The reversal came too late for a great deal of needless suffering. As of early August, more than 2,400 measles cases had been confirmed in 2026 alone -- already surpassing all of 2025, which was itself the worst year in over three decades. Cases have now been reported in 45 states, with major outbreaks tearing through South Carolina, Utah, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. 93% of those infected were unvaccinated. And the country now stands on the brink of losing the measles-elimination status it earned in 2000 -- a formal review the Kennedy-led department asked to postpone until after the election.
None of this was inevitable. It is the predictable result of falling vaccination rates, which have slipped below the threshold needed to keep the virus from spreading -- a decline Kennedy himself spent twenty years helping to drive. Even now, his conversion is partial and grudging. Pressed on whether he bore any responsibility for the epidemic on his watch, he answered: "Absolutely not." He blamed the families in the communities where children have died.
Roald Dahl had no way to protect Olivia in 1962; he wrote, in his grief, so that other parents would not have to bury a child as he had. Today's parents have exactly what he lacked -- a safe, effective vaccine, available for the asking. Children are not falling ill today because medicine failed them. Children are needlessly suffering and even dying because their parents were told, by some of the most powerful people in the country, to fear the very thing that would have protected them.
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To read Roald Dahl's letter in full, visit https://fs.blog/roald-dahl-letter-daughter/
To introduce today's kids to what used to be another common childhood disease prior to vaccinations, polio, we highly recommend the books "Blue" (https://www.amightygirl.com/blue) and "Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio" (https://www.amightygirl.com/small-steps), both for ages 9 and up
For a powerful biography for adult readers about Judith Heumann, the famous disability rights leader who became paralyzed by polio as a toddler, we highly recommend at https://www.amightygirl.com/being-heumann -- her memoir is also available in a Young Readers Edition for ages 10 to 15 at https://www.amightygirl.com/rolling-warrior
To introduce children to pioneering women of public health who believed in science, we highly recommend "Dr. Jo: How Sara Josephine Baker Saved the Lives of America's Children" for ages 5 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/dr-jo) and “The Doctor with an Eye for Eyes: The Story of Dr. Patricia Bath” for ages 5 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/the-doctor-with-an-eye-for-eyes)
For more children's books about pioneering women of science, visit our blog post, "60 Children's Books to Inspire Science-Loving Mighty Girls," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=13914
To see more stories from A Mighty Girl, you can sign-up for A Mighty Girl's free email newsletter at https://www.amightygirl.com/forms/newsletter
