Also measles resets your immune system. Your immune system keeps records of all the crap it’s fought, making it easier to fight next time. When you get measles, it’s like you’re a new born. So he’s not only allowing ppl to die, he’s making it easier for future illnesses to kill as well.

article on measles

Two studies of unvaccinated children in an Orthodox Protestant community in the Netherlands found that measles wipes out the immune system’s memory of previous illnesses, returning it to a more baby-like state, and also leaves the body less equipped to fight off new infections.

The first paper, led by Velislava Petrova, of the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Cambridge University, says measles erodes two separate lines of defence of the immune system.

To tackle previously unseen infections, the immune system relies on constantly pumping out a diverse range of immune cells – thousands of different varieties, each with slightly different receptors on their surfaces, with a collective ability to recognise almost any pathogen.

“The more diverse range of them we have, the better,” said Petrova. However, after measles, the children had a far more restricted range.

The immune system also creates long-lived memory cells, which remain permanently in circulation, allowing the body to rapidly recognise and eliminate previously encountered infections.

However, after measles, a substantial proportion of immune memory cells had disappeared from the children’s blood, in what the scientists described as “immune amnesia”. This could even mean that children who become infected with measles may need to be revaccinated for previous diseases.