Amid one of the most significant measles outbreaks in over 30 years, America’s top public health official is using his platform to peddle misinformation and fake cures and push an agenda that is opposed to evidence-based medicine and science.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is steering public health far off course. This diversion becomes more dangerous and difficult to correct each passing week.
Kennedy has refused to state unequivocally that vaccination is the only way to prevent measles. Our vaccine works so well — two doses are 97 percent effective against the virus — that until the three deaths this year, no one in the U.S. had died from the disease in a decade. In fact, measles was declared eliminated from the country in 2000.
And yet, as cases rose to 935 across 30 states last week — a number that public health experts believe is likely a gross underestimation — Kennedy refused to acknowledge the gravity of the situation. In a NewsNation interview, he downplayed the outbreak here by pointing out it wasn’t as bad as what other countries, such as Canada, are experiencing.
He then went on to falsely claim the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine contains “a lot of aborted fetus debris and DNA particles.”
Worse, Kennedy is actively shifting the focus from vaccination to unproven cures.
That push “is distracting from what you really need to do to control measles, which is prevent it,” said Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at the University of Colorado. O’Leary notes that people have looked for treatments for measles, and nothing particularly works — and there certainly aren’t any cures. That includes cod oil and vitamin A, which Kennedy has pushed.
Kennedy’s reckless strategy also increases the chances of measles returning to endemicity. A recent paper in JAMA highlighted the grave consequences of giving up the decadeslong effort to eliminate measles in the U.S. Vaccination rates against routine childhood diseases have softened, and researchers found that if nothing improves, measles will likely return to endemic levels within the next 20 years.
The secretary’s ill-conceived plan shouldn’t surprise anyone. Since the earliest days of his HHS appointment, he has pushed unproven treatments and preventions for measles. Unfortunately, his inaccurate messaging has had an impact. A new poll by KFF found that 20 percent of adults had heard the false claim that vitamin A can prevent measles.
That fake claim is not only confusing Americans but also making them sick. Just weeks after Kennedy began talking up vitamin A, a hospital in West Texas, where the measles outbreak began, reported several children had been admitted with liver toxicity caused by large doses of the supplement.
That same KFF poll also found that in the last year, the false claim that the MMR vaccine is more dangerous than measles — another myth propagated by Kennedy — has landed on the public’s radar.
Kennedy’s constant stream of vaccine misinformation and disinformation and his ill-advised decision-making have caused public health experts to take extraordinary steps to protect the public. Last month, the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy launched the Vaccine Integrity Project, an effort that is still taking shape but is intended to defend vaccine use.
I’m thrilled to see someone stepping up. Still, it is deeply disturbing that things have so rapidly deteriorated under Kennedy’s leadership that Americans need an external body to safeguard our health. How can we expect the public to parse who and what to believe?
When the measles outbreak began, public health experts, politicians, and journalists practically begged Kennedy to come out to support vaccination — to say, without qualifiers or confounders, that immunization would stop the spread. Any hope of that is long gone. Worse, each new decision is pushing us further away from evidence-based medicine.
Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry.
