Okay, I'm not a scientist, but I'm pretty sure that sentence is not accurate.
The percentage of people that die from measles is extremely low, and it's hard to tell if it's the disease that causes it, or simply the fact that the person was already very weak (and therefore would have died from another sickness such as complications of a cold).
"Most lethal" is accurate if you're talking total deaths, not death rate, and if you assume the non-existence of vaccines. Pre-vaccination, roughly 7-8m children died every year from measles. By comparison, HIV currently kills about 1.1m, TB kills 1.5m, and malaria kills about 438k. This is an admittedly misleading definition of "most lethal", though, because it incorporates its contagiousness as a factor and assumes no vaccines and developing-world conditions. In the developed world, the death rate from measles is only about 0.2%, which is comparable with some of the more virulent influenza strains, but still an order of magnitude less than the 1918 flu pandemic.
Only because most of the children are vaccinated!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles
"It causes the most vaccine-preventable deaths of any disease."
"In 1980, the disease was estimated to have caused 2.6 million deaths per year."
It would be an unbelievably cruel experiment, but if "anti-vaxxers" would win in the US and force it on everybody, in about, let's say, a decade there would been enough children deaths (it's 2 from every 1000 infected!) to prove them wrong.
As long as the most of children are vaccinated, it's the vaccinated ones who protect those of "anti."
"The risk of death among those infected is usually 0.2%, but may be up to 10% in those who have malnutrition." (from your link)
To answer to wmboy's question "how does it compare to malaria" -- malaria wasn't treatable with vaccines up to now, there are very recent successes to develop one which is still only 25%-50% effective (has a relatively low efficacy and it was only recently, 2015, approved for use outside trials). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria_vaccine I don't think you'd like mosquitoes biting you if you would travel, for example, to Africa, where malaria is common.
The 2.6 million deaths per year were mostly from Africa right? Does that mean child mortality rates have improved that much?
I'm not saying that measles isn't a killer disease, but how does it compare to malaria for instance?
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/meas.html
Maybe they mean lethal in absolute but not relative numbers?
If the author of this opinion piece is correct, it could well be that vaccination is keeping the most deadly disease from causing the most deaths.
Another way this could happen would be if measles killed people so fast they couldn't infect others, although I've never heard anyone make this claim.
Although I don't think the argument is compelling, it is a great question: is there some other reason that measles isn't killing as many people as it used, other than vaccination? To answer that question, we do need scientific research not logic.
Just a question... kind of playing the devil's advocate, but I think it's usually ignored by most people when talking about vaccination.
A similar disease called progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) is due to an immunocompromised state. Patients with HIV and those taking certain medications with multiple sclerosis are at risk.
And as far as "the leading cause of death", diarrhoea or pneumonia are arguably the biggest cause of deaths in children.