A toddler in the USA has died from measles.
Simply two weeks after his affirmation as Well being and Human Companies secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faces the general public well being disaster that consultants have lengthy warned would come.
Little is understood in regards to the little one, moreover that they had been school-age, unvaccinated and lived in an space of West Texas with a big Mennonite neighborhood, the place vaccine refusal is among the many highest within the nation.
In one other administration, the loss of life of this little one, and the rising outbreak that has sickened greater than 150 throughout Texas and New Mexico and hospitalized 20, would doubtless have been met with pressing calls from the president and well being secretary for folks in Texas and past to vaccinate their youngsters. The measles, mumps and rubella vaccine is secure, effectively studied and the one efficient methodology of stopping an sickness that may trigger a excessive fever, pneumonia and, in uncommon instances, 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 answerable for the businesses that regulate and advise on vaccines wrote in a 2021 ebook 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 loss of life provided one thing else fully: an unconcerned and informal reply.
“We’re following the measles epidemic day by 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 common. We’ve 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 issue respiration.
The subsequent day, the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention posted a press release on its web site providing condolences for the kid who died and outlining methods it was supporting Texas and New Mexico well being businesses because the states lead the on-the-ground response. The assertion included a line on vaccines as “the most effective protection towards measles an infection” however didn’t urge the general public to get vaccinated. A day after that, Kennedy posted the same word to his official account on X, concluding, “Ending the measles outbreak is a prime 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 loss of life 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 20 years in the past: a 13-year-old boy with a continual immune dysfunction who had not too long ago undergone a bone marrow transplant. Across the identical time, Kennedy, an environmental lawyer then identified for his public battle with heroin habit, was diving down the anti-vaccine rabbit gap and shortly turning 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 targeted on thimerosal, a preservative, however after it was faraway from most childhood vaccines in 2001, Iannelli stated Kennedy shifted to different components, identified and unknown, falsely blaming them for myriad childhood diseases.
Iannelli stated Kennedy’s books had been too abundantly fallacious 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 acquired 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, Youngsters’s Well being Protection, has been discovered within the locations the place measles threatened youngsters most, typically cinematically amplifying his anti-vaccine rhetoric by a bullhorn to probably the most susceptible: to Minnesota’s Somali refugee neighborhood within the midst of a 2017 outbreak, to New York’s capital in 2019 the place he urged lawmakers to weaken college 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 hundreds and killed 83, largely babies.
Throughout his a long time 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 company constructed across the false concept that vaccines trigger autism, he attacked the CDC as a “cesspool of corruption,” full of profiteers who knowingly hurt youngsters, and likened scientists to Nazi guards. In response to Kennedy, drugmakers, the federal government, the media and the complete scientific neighborhood are masking up the menace vaccines pose to youngsters.
However it wasn’t till Covid that Kennedy discovered a mainstream viewers for his anti-vaccine concepts. In 2022, Youngsters’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 People: Childhood vaccine charges had been additionally plummeting. Kennedy then took his concepts on the highway 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 line of all of it’s a warfare towards science and profession scientists which have stored America wholesome and secure for greater than a half century.”
Now, Kennedy sits atop the very system he spent a long time attacking, chargeable 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 quick 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 brought on by 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 ailments 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 Youngsters’s Well being Protection and dozens of different outstanding anti-vaccine influencers have rallied to Kennedy’s protection since information of the measles loss of life in Texas. They’ve argued a single loss of life, whereas devastating, doesn’t represent a public well being disaster and that public consideration can 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 dad and mom to not vaccinate, Bigtree ran by the standard script — downplaying the outbreak, questioning whether or not measles was actually the reason for loss of life for the Texas little one, and pushing unproven therapies like vitamin A over vaccines. He ended with a happy nod to the administration. “Our man is now head of HHS,” Bigtree stated.
For public well being consultants, although, Kennedy’s earliest actions are a warning.
“I believe that is the start,” stated Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Training Heart at Youngsters’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who serves on the FDA vaccine advisory committee whose assembly was canceled this week.
“After I noticed an image of Kennedy sitting in entrance of the massive emblem that stated Division of Well being and Human Companies, that to me was the start of a horror film,” stated Offit, the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine. “And I can not imagine it’s going to final. I can not 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 may very well be upended by his response to a measles epidemic stays to be seen. But when that is only the start, the query could also be: Now that an anti-vaccine activist wields affect over the nation’s meals, medication and well being infrastructure, the place will he purpose subsequent?
