Michael Knowles described measles in passing as a disease "which used to be not that big a deal... It was nothing. It was like the chicken pox." We rate that mostly-false, truth score 0.15, confidence 0.95.

Pre-vaccine, measles and chickenpox each caused about 4 million U.S. cases a year — and measles produced roughly four to five times the hospitalizations and four to five times the deaths.

The claim comes from The Michael Knowles Show, Ep. 2048 ("Trump Ranks the Best American Presidents"), published August 28, 2026, at the 26:12 mark. It is an eight-word aside inside a sentence whose actual subject is NBC News.

We steelman it first. The cultural premise is true: before 1963 measles was near-universal and America treated it as routine, the 1969 Brady Bunch episode is real, and U.S. measles case-fatality genuinely did fall for d ...