In the wake of the growing measles outbreak in Texas, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. published an op-ed on Fox News’ website over the weekend, urging Americans to … get vaccinated.
With the subhead “MMR vaccine is crucial to avoiding potentially deadly disease,” the infamous anti-vaxxer wrote, “Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.”
Texas Health and Human Services first reported the outbreak in mid-January. The disease rapidly spread, reaching nearly 150 confirmed cases. The majority (if not almost all) of those cases are among children who have not received the MMR vaccine. Texas officials say the outbreak is the worst in almost three decades.
Last week, during Donald Trump’s bizarre Cabinet meeting, Kennedy glibly dismissed a measles-related death of a school-aged child as “not unusual.” It was the first measles fatality recorded in the U.S. in over a decade.
Kennedy has spent much of his career promoting anti-vaccine misinformation, notably amplifying debunked bad science connecting the MMR vaccine to autism rates in children. Kennedy, along with others in the anti-vaxx movement have contributed to declining vaccination rates, resulting in outbreaks like the one in Texas.
The Texas outbreak, which began in Gaines County and has now spread to eight more counties, had alarmingly low vaccination rates among its cases of school-aged children. This is not just by chance; It has been fomented by Mr. Measles and his anti-science allies for decades.
At the same time, the Children's Health Defense, the organization Kennedy founded and previously chaired, continues to promote false information about the Texas outbreak. On February 20, its official social media account blamed the outbreak on the MMR vaccine itself. Their claims have the same amount of evidence they have always had—zero.
Kennedy can write as many toothless op-eds as he likes, but as cases pile up Kennedy’s first order of business at the HHS was to gut the agency tasked with educating the public and preventing outbreaks like this one. Kennedy even abruptly canceled the FDA’s planned meeting for next flu season and paused multimillion-dollar efforts to develop a new COVID-19 vaccine to deal with new strains.
With the Trump administration’s history of mismanaging public health, and Elon Musk’s focus on destroying our government agencies, the future is only going to get more dangerous for Americans.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
