Whooping cough cases soar as vaccination rates drop

Source: NBC News

Dec. 17, 2025, 5:47 PM EST


At just 2 weeks old, Feleena Owens was struggling to breathe. The newborn was coughing so badly, her skin turned a sickly gray-blue color. Her face contorted as she tried to gulp air. “I think the longest she would stop breathing was about 10, 11 seconds,” said her mother, Sophie Owens, 24.

Soon, Feleena was airlifted to Dallas, about 80 miles away from the small city of Sulphur Springs, Texas, near where the Owenses lived at the time. “They did tell us that if we didn’t bring her in when we did, there is a high possibility she wouldn’t have seen the next day,” her father, Justin Owens, said.

Feleena had pertussis, or whooping cough. She spent the next several weeks of her life in the neonatal intensive care unit. For more than a week, she was on a ventilator, tubes running in and out of her tiny body, her mother said.

Feleena is just one of a rapidly growing number of people — mainly children — infected with whooping cough in recent years. As of Dec. 6, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had logged 26,632 cases of whooping cough in 2025. The last time the U.S. saw so many cases was more than a decade ago, in 2014, according to CDC data.

Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-health/whooping-cough-vaccines-cases-us-pertussis-rcna248746