Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised at his confirmation hearings that he was no longer a vaccine-denier and swore he would follow the science.
He lied.
When addressing the death of a Mennonite child in Texas who was unvaccinated, Kennedy attributed the death to poor nutrition and lack of exercise, not to her parents’ failure to get her vaccinated. He emphasized that the choice to get vaccinated was personal, not a matter of public health. And he reiterated the risks of getting vaccinated. He is an unrepentant vaccine-denier. The Atlantic just published a story by Tom Bartlett, who interviewed the child’s father. Mennonites don’t trust vaccines. Bartlett points out that before the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963, 400-500 measles deaths occurred every year. Measles deaths are rare now.
The New York Times reported:
In a sweeping interview, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, outlined a strategy for containing the measles outbreak in West Texas that strayed far from mainstream science, relying heavily on fringe theories about prevention and treatments.
He issued a muffled call for vaccinations in the affected community, but said the choice was a personal one. He suggested that measles vaccine injuries were more common than known, contrary to extensive research.
He asserted that natural immunity to measles, gained through infection, somehow also protected against cancer and heart disease, a claim not supported by research.
He cheered on questionable treatments like cod liver oil, and said that local doctors had achieved “almost miraculous and instantaneous” recoveries with steroids or antibiotics.
The worsening measles outbreak, which has largely spread through a Mennonite community in Gaines County, has infected nearly 200 people and killed a child, the first such death in the United States in 10 years.
Another suspected measles death has been reported in New Mexico, where cases have recently increased in a county that borders Gaines County.
The interview, which lasted 35 minutes, was posted online by Fox News last week, just before the President Trump’s address to Congress. Segments had been posted earlier, but the full version received little attention.
Mr. Kennedy offered conflicting public health messages as he tried to reconcile the government’s longstanding endorsement of vaccines with his own decades-long skepticism.
Vaccines are “recommended” for West Texans, but the risks of immunization have been underestimated, he said.
Mr. Kennedy acknowledged that vaccines “do prevent infection” and said that the federal government was helping ensure that people have access to “good medicines, including those who want them, to vaccines.”
“In highly unvaccinated communities like Mennonites, it’s something that we recommend,” he said.
Mr. Kennedy described vaccination as a personal choice that must be respected, then went on to raise frightening concerns about the safety of the vaccines.
He said he’d been told that a dozen Mennonite children had been injured by vaccines in Gaines County. People in the community wanted federal health workers arriving in Texas “to also look at our vaccine-injured kids and look them in the eye,” Mr. Kennedy said.
Yet the M.M.R. vaccine itself has been thoroughly studied and is safe. There is no link to autism, as the secretary has claimed in the past. While all vaccines have occasional adverse effects, health officials worldwide have concluded that the benefits far outweigh the very small risks of vaccination.
Mr. Kennedy asserted otherwise: “We don’t know what the risk profile is for these products. We need to restore government trust. And we’re going to do that by telling the truth, and by doing rigorous science to understand both safety and efficacy issues….”
In later comments, Mr. Kennedy suggested that severe symptoms mainly affected people who were unhealthy before contracting measles.
“It’s very, very difficult for measles to kill a healthy person,” he said, adding later that “we see a correlation between people who get hurt by measles and people who don’t have good nutrition or who don’t have a good exercise regimen.”
West Texas is “kind of a food desert,” he added. Malnutrition “may have been an issue” for the child who died of measles in Gaines County.
Texas health officials said the child had “no known underlying conditions.”
Dr. Wendell Parkey, a physician in Gaines County with many Mennonite patients, said the idea that the community was malnourished was mistaken.
Mennonites often avoid processed foods, raise their own livestock and make their own bread, he noted. From a very young age, many members of the community also help with farming and other physically demanding jobs.
“They’re the healthiest people out here,” he said. “Nutritionally, I would put them up against anybody.”
