A measles disaster many years within the making: How RFK Jr. helped drive America to this second

A toddler in the USA has died from measles.

Simply two weeks after his affirmation as Well being and Human Providers secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faces the general public well being disaster that specialists have lengthy warned would come.

Little is understood concerning the little one, moreover that they had been school-age, unvaccinated and lived in an space of West Texas with a big Mennonite group, the place vaccine refusal is among the many highest within the nation. 

In one other administration, the demise of this little one, and the rising outbreak that has sickened greater than 150 throughout Texas and New Mexico and hospitalized 20, would seemingly have been met with pressing calls from the president and well being secretary for fogeys in Texas and past to vaccinate their youngsters. The measles, mumps and rubella vaccine is secure, nicely studied and the one efficient technique of stopping an sickness that may trigger a excessive fever, pneumonia and, in uncommon circumstances, mind swelling that’s disabling or deadly.

However that is public well being within the Kennedy period, the place the secretary’s life’s work has been dismantling belief within the very vaccines that would have prevented this outbreak, and the place the general public official now in control of the companies that regulate and advise on vaccines wrote in a 2021 guide that measles outbreaks had been “fabricated to create concern that in flip forces authorities officers to ‘do one thing.’”

And so, at a Cupboard assembly Wednesday, Kennedy’s response to the kid’s demise provided one thing else totally: an unconcerned and informal reply.

“We’re following the measles epidemic every single day,” Kennedy stated, including that “by the way, there have been 4 measles outbreaks this yr. On this nation final yr there have been 16. So it’s commonplace. We now have measles outbreaks yearly.”

Kennedy then stated that the hospitalized youngsters had been there “primarily for quarantine,” an assertion swiftly dismissed by the chief medical officer on the Lubbock youngsters’s hospital the place they’re being handled, who described the admitted youngsters as having problem respiration.

The subsequent day, the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention posted an announcement on its web site providing condolences for the kid who died and outlining methods it was supporting Texas and New Mexico well being companies because the states lead the on-the-ground response. The assertion included a line on vaccines as “one of the best protection in opposition to measles an infection” however didn’t urge the general public to get vaccinated. A day after that, Kennedy posted an analogous word to his official account on X, concluding, “Ending the measles outbreak is a high precedence for me and my extraordinary workforce at HHS.”

The White Home and HHS didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.

Regardless of Kennedy’s claims, the demise of a kid from measles — whereas frequent in nations in Africa, the Center East and Asia — is uncommon right here. And Kennedy is an uncommon HHS secretary.

The U.S. formally eradicated the measles in 2000, and the final time a toddler died was over twenty years in the past: a 13-year-old boy with a continual immune dysfunction who had just lately undergone a bone marrow transplant. Across the identical time, Kennedy, an environmental lawyer then identified for his public battle with heroin dependancy, was diving down the anti-vaccine rabbit gap and shortly changing into the motion’s de facto chief and its most vocal purveyor of misinformation.

Dr. Vincent Iannelli, a pediatrician in Rockwall, Texas, a five-hour drive from the present outbreak, has been debunking Kennedy’s claims since 2016 on his web site Vaxopedia. Early on, Kennedy centered on thimerosal, a preservative, however after it was faraway from most childhood vaccines in 2001, Iannelli stated Kennedy shifted to different substances, identified and unknown, falsely blaming them for myriad childhood sicknesses.

Iannelli stated Kennedy’s books had been too abundantly unsuitable to be fact-checked in full, so he settled for running a blog on the “first 5 lies” he present in every, noting he by no means received previous the third web page.

“It was all lies and misinformation,” Iannelli stated.

Over the previous 20 years, Kennedy, as head of the group he led, Kids’s Well being Protection, has been discovered within the locations the place measles threatened youngsters most, typically cinematically amplifying his anti-vaccine rhetoric by way of a bullhorn to probably the most susceptible: to Minnesota’s Somali refugee group within the midst of a 2017 outbreak, to New York’s capital in 2019 the place he urged lawmakers to weaken faculty vaccine mandates amid one other outbreak, and that very same yr to Samoa, the place he lobbied the prime minister to rethink the mass vaccination marketing campaign that finally stopped a measles outbreak, however not earlier than it sickened 1000’s and killed 83, principally babies.

Throughout his many years of activism, Kennedy has made clear who he believes to be the villains in his vaccine conspiracy theories. In keynote addresses at annual conferences for a corporation constructed across the false concept that vaccines trigger autism, he attacked the CDC as a “cesspool of corruption,” stuffed with profiteers who knowingly hurt youngsters, and likened scientists to Nazi guards. In line with Kennedy, drugmakers, the federal government, the media and your entire scientific group are protecting up the risk vaccines pose to youngsters.

Nevertheless it wasn’t till Covid that Kennedy discovered a mainstream viewers for his anti-vaccine concepts. In 2022, Kids’s Well being Protection, after quadrupling its annual income over the course of the pandemic, heralded the “silver lining” of a virus that had killed over 1 million Individuals: Childhood vaccine charges had been additionally plummeting. Kennedy then took his concepts on the street in a failed presidential run that appealed to a coalition of anti-vaccine activists, wellness influencers and disaffected libertarians — finally drawing the eye and partnership of Donald Trump, who embraced his former rival as a figurehead and rallying pressure for what Kennedy branded MAHA (Make America Wholesome Once more), a coalition skeptical of presidency and public well being establishments.

“MAHA is a place that’s anti-science and anti-public well being,” stated Lawrence Gostin, a professor of public well being legislation at Georgetown College. “The by way of line of all of it’s a warfare in opposition to science and profession scientists which have saved America wholesome and secure for greater than a half century.”

Now, Kennedy sits atop the very system he spent many years attacking, liable for the nation’s well being coverage and already chipping away on the establishments he’s been appointed to steer.

His first two weeks have been busy. His brief tenure has been marked by mass firings of CDC personnel, many tasked with illness detection and outbreak response; the cancellation of a Meals and Drug Administration advisory committee assembly that will have chosen the virus strains for subsequent season’s flu vaccine (he has stated he suspects a dysfunction that strains his vocal cords was attributable to the flu vaccine); the indefinite postponement of a CDC advisory committee that votes on suggestions for childhood vaccine schedules; the cancellation of pro-vaccination promoting campaigns, reportedly shifting the main focus from the hazard of illnesses like flu to the potential dangers of vaccines; and a proposal that HHS finish discover and remark procedures for guidelines associated to “public property, loans, grants, advantages, or contracts,” a coverage that appears to run counter to his promise for “radical transparency” on the company.

His supporters within the anti-vaccine motion couldn’t be prouder.

Del Bigtree, head of the anti-vaccine group the Knowledgeable Consent Motion Community, leaders at Kids’s Well being Protection and dozens of different distinguished anti-vaccine influencers have rallied to Kennedy’s protection since information of the measles demise in Texas. They’ve argued a single demise, whereas devastating, doesn’t represent a public well being disaster and that public consideration could be higher spent on different threats.

Bigtree devoted a section to the Texas outbreak on his web TV present “The HighWire” on Thursday. In an interview with a Lengthy Island pediatrician well-known for encouraging mother and father to not vaccinate, Bigtree ran by way of the standard script — downplaying the outbreak, questioning whether or not measles was really the reason for demise for the Texas little one, and pushing unproven therapies like vitamin A over vaccines. He ended with a glad nod to the administration. “Our man is now head of HHS,” Bigtree stated.

For public well being specialists, although, Kennedy’s earliest actions are a warning.

“I feel that is the start,” stated Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Schooling Heart at Kids’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who serves on the FDA vaccine advisory committee whose assembly was canceled this week.

“Once I noticed an image of Kennedy sitting in entrance of the large emblem that stated Division of Well being and Human Providers, that to me was the start of a horror film,” stated Offit, the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine. “And I can’t imagine it is going to final. I can’t imagine that somebody who has an anti-public well being stance like he has, can final. As a result of measles is coming to get him.”

Whether or not Kennedy’s reign could possibly be upended by his response to a measles epidemic stays to be seen. But when that is just the start, the query could also be: Now that an anti-vaccine activist wields affect over the nation’s meals, drugs and well being infrastructure, the place will he purpose subsequent?