A US child died of measles.
Just two weeks after his confirmation as Director of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faces a public health crisis that experts have long warned.
Little is known about children, but they were not school-aged, unvaccinated, and lived in the West Texas area along with the Mennonite community, the country’s highest vaccine rejection.
Another administration would have met with urgent calls from the president and the health secretary for parents in Texas and beyond, as the child’s death and the rise in the outbreak of over 150 people getting sick and 20 hospitalised in Texas and New Mexico. Measles, mumps and rubella vaccines are safe, well-studied, and are the only effective way to prevent high fevers, pneumonia, and in rare cases, diseases that can cause disorders or fatal brain swelling.
But this was public health during the Kennedy era, and the work of the secretary’s life is dismantling the very trust in the vaccine that could prevent this outbreak, and now the civil servants responsible for the vaccine are in charge of the agency they wrote in their 2021 book, which has written a collapsed outbreak “is made to create the fear of “forced” and “strong” government officials.”
And at Wednesday’s cabinet meeting, Kennedy’s response to the death of a child provided something else: an indifferent and accidental reply.
“We follow the measles epidemic every day,” Kennedy said. Last year there were 16 in this country. So that’s not uncommon. Measles occurs every year. ”
Kennedy then said the children admitted to the hospital were there “mainly for quarantine.” This was quickly fired by the Chief Medical Officer of Lubbock Children’s Hospital where they were being treated, explaining that the recognized child has difficulty breathing.
The following day, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted a statement on its website, expressing sadness to children who outlined how the state could support health agencies in Texas and New Mexico to lead the state’s response on the ground. The statement included a line on vaccines as “the best protection against measles infection,” but did not urge the public to get vaccinated. The next day, Kennedy posted a similar note to X’s official account, concluded, “Ending the measles outbreak is a top priority for me and for the extraordinary team at HHS.”
The White House and HHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Despite Kennedy’s claims, child deaths from measles are common in countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asian, but rare here. And Kennedy is a rare HHS secretary.
The United States officially eliminated measles in 2000, and the child last died more than 20 years ago. A 13-year-old boy with chronic immune disorder recently undergoing a bone marrow transplant. Around the same time, Kennedy, an environmental lawyer known at the time for his public battle with heroin addiction, jumped into the anti-vaccine rabbit hole and quickly became the de facto leader of the movement, the most vocal of that misinformation.
Dr. Vincent Inelli, a pediatrician in Rockwall, Texas, has been a five-hour drive from his current outbreak and has exposed Kennedy’s claims on his website Vaxopedia since 2016. Early on, Kennedy focused on the preservative thimerosal, but after being removed from most pediatric vaccines in 2001, Inelli said Kennedy had shifted to other known and unknown ingredients, falsely condemned countless childhood illnesses.
Iannelli pointed out that Kennedy’s book is virtually not completely checked to be so wrong, that he settled on his blog about the “first five lies” he found in each, and did not pass the third page.
“It was all a lie and misinformation,” Ineli said.
Over the past 20 years, Kennedy has been found where measles has most threatened children as a child health defense, the head of the group he led, cinematically amplifying anti-vaccine rhetoric on the most vulnerable. In another outbreak, he went to Samoa that same year, where he encouraged the Prime Minister to reconsider the massive vaccination campaign that ultimately stopped the measles outbreak, but not before killing thousands, 83, mostly small children.
During decades of activism, Kennedy revealed who believes he is the villain of his vaccine conspiracy theory. In his keynote speech at the organization’s annual conference, built around the false idea that vaccines cause autism, he attacked the CDC as a “revolutionary cesspool,” filling it with profiteering who deliberately injures children, and likened scientists to Nazi security guards. According to Kennedy, drugmakers, the government, the media and the scientific community as a whole are hiding the threat the vaccine poses to children.
But it wasn’t until Covid that Kennedy found a mainstream audience for his anti-vaccine ideas. In 2022, Children’s Health Defense told us the “silver lining” of the virus that killed more than a million Americans after quadrupled annual incomes during the course of the pandemic. Kennedy then took on the road idea with the failed presidential run. This appealed to a coalition of anti-vaccine activists, wellness influencers and disgruntled libertarians.
“We’ve seen a lot of people who have had a lot of trouble with us,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of public health law at Georgetown University. “All of that line is a war between science and career scientists that have kept America healthy and safe for over half a century.”
Now Kennedy sits on top of that very very much that he has attacked for decades, taking over the country’s health policy and removing the institutions he has already appointed to lead.
His first two weeks were busy. His short tenure is characterized by mass shootings by CDC officers tasked with detecting and responding to diseases. The Food and Drug Administration’s Advisory Board meeting cancelled that selected the virus strain for the flu vaccine next season (he suspects that his vocal cords are caused by a disorder caused by the flu vaccine). An indefinite postponement of the CDC Advisory Committee to vote on recommendations for childhood vaccine schedules. The cancellation of the vaccine promotion ad campaign reportedly shifted its focus from the risk of diseases like the flu to the potential risks of vaccines. It also suggests that HHS terminate the notice and comment procedure for rules relating to “public property, loans, grants, benefits or contracts.” This is a policy that appears to violate his promises of “radical transparency” at the agency.
His supporters of the anti-vaccine movement were not proud.
Delbig Tree, the head of the anti-vaccine group, is an informed consent action network, where child health defense leaders and dozens of other prominent anti-vaccine influencers have gathered in Kennedy’s defense since the news of a measles death in Texas. They claimed one death, although devastating, not constitute a public health crisis, and that the attention of the public would be better spent on other threats.
Big Tree dedicated a segment to the Texas outbreak on Thursday’s internet television show The Highwire. In an interview with a Long Island pediatrician known for encouraging parents not to get vaccinated, Big Tree ran through the usual script – disregarding the outbreak, questioning whether measles was the cause of the death of a Texas child, and pushing unproven treatments like vitamin A beyond vaccines. He ended with a nod of satisfaction with the administration. “Our man is now the head of HHS,” Big Tree said.
But for public health experts, Kennedy’s earliest action is a warning.
“I think this is the beginning,” says Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Center for Vaccine Education at Children’s Hospital of Children’s Hospital, who is on the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee, whose meeting was cancelled this week.
Offit, co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, said: “And I can’t believe it will last, as he has, someone with the opposite health condition can last, because measles is coming to get him.”
It remains to be seen whether Kennedy’s rule could be overthrown by his reaction to the measles epidemic. But if this is just the beginning, the problem is: Now, where will he turn next with anti-vaccine activists impacting food, medicine and health infrastructure across the country?
