did rubella ever cause an epidemic?

Answer 1

There have been plenty of outbreaks of rubella (German measles) throughout history. It's one of those childhood diseases that used to go through villages quickly. However, has there ever been a large scale pandemic of rubella that killed or maimed a lot of people? No. Nonetheless, you can thank MMR vaccines for cutting incidence of this disease to almost nothing.

And you can thank the anti-vaccine nutjobs to for not giving their kids MMR and causing the number of cases to rise again.