A second child has died from measles. And RFK Jr. attended the funeral.
Kennedy said in a social media post that he was working to “control the outbreak” and went to Gaines County to comfort the families who have buried two young children. He was seen late Sunday afternoon outside of a Mennonite church where the funeral services were held, but he did not attend a nearby news conference held by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the outbreak.
As with most of what comes out of Kennedy’s mouth, his claim that he’s working to bring the outbreak under control is dubious. Kennedy is the same man who has spouted vaccine skepticism for decades. He’s the same Secretary of Health and Human Services that opined only weeks ago that maybe everyone should just get the measles. The same man who has compounded the negative outcomes from the outbreak by pushing alternative treatments that have caused some people, mostly children, to get even sicker. And the department he leads, the one charged with keeping diseases like measles in check, has slashed thousands of jobs, including jobs that would be directly employed to help with this very outbreak.
As a result, 50 vaccination clinics in Texas have been scrapped, places that were working to combat the outbreak that has spread largely among those who are unvaccinated.
More than 20 public health workers have also been laid off, including those who administer vaccines and lab staff who are tasked with measles surveillance and prevention.
I don’t believe RFK Jr. is quite so evil so as to be actively trying to ensure people are infected with measles, particularly children. But his attendance at a funeral he helped to author is vulgar, to put it mildly. And that he punctuated that visit first with what should be table stakes for a man in his position, advocating for the MMR vaccine as the solution to the outbreak, and then followed it up by praising doctor’s once again for employing alternative treatments is certainly evil, intentionally or not.
During his visit to Texas, RFK Jr.—a regularly debunked vaccine skeptic—offered his strongest endorsement of vaccination yet. He stated in a social media post Sunday that “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR [the combination measles, mumps, and rubella] vaccine.” At the same time, he continued to promote medically unsound treatments for the viral disease. In a separate post, he stated that he met with two doctors, Richard Bartlett and Ben Edwards, and claimed that they had “treated and healed” some 300 Mennonite children using a combination of aerosolized budesonide (a steroid) and clarithromycin (an antibiotic).
Doctors have occasionally turned to steroids for serious and relevant measles complications, such as brain swelling, but there isn’t strong-enough evidence supporting its standard use. A 2023 study, for instance, failed to find that steroids were associated with better outcomes during a 2017 measles outbreak in Italy (thankfully, they weren’t associated with worse outcomes). Antibiotics can be used to treat secondary bacterial infections that could emerge from measles, but they can’t directly treat viral infections. These medications aren’t risk-free either: steroids are known to weaken people’s immune systems, for instance.
These deaths are a result of Kennedy’s misapplied “advocacy” against vaccination. The blood of two children and one adult are, at least partially, on his hands. That he then hijacked such a tragic moment for these families to turn them into a photo opportunity for his Twitter account represents a level of debasement I honestly wouldn’t have thought possible.
It’s hard not to be angry about all of this. Angry at RFK Jr. for helping create the anti-vaccine climate to begin with. Angry at Trump for daring to put Kennedy in charge of American healthcare. And, I’ll admit, angry at the parents of these children who are willing to sacrifice their children’s lives for a belief structure.
Last month, when The Onion had a headline about how Kennedy had tepidly advocated for the MMR vaccine, one of its fictional man-on-the-street quotes was so brilliant that it made me literally laugh out loud.
That becomes far less funny when you see this very real quote from the mother of one of the children who died from measles. She was asked by a vaccine skeptic if her thoughts on the vaccine had changed after losing a child.
Through a translator, who spoke low German, the parents’ primary language, her response was that she would still say, “Don’t do the shots. There [are] doctors that can help with measles. [Measles is] not as bad as they’re making it out to be.”
This is pure cultish behavior. The idea of essentially burying one of your children but saying what killed them wasn’t all that bad because your other four kids survived is one that I can’t comprehend. But because of a combination of enablement by the likes of RFK Jr. and an administration willing to let him steer our collective healthcare, we’ve reached the point in the story in which mothers of dead children say they’d do it all over again if they could.
And all that really means is we’re not likely to see the end of this measles outbreak any time soon.
"prosper on, prosper off"?