@emmettmacfarlane.com:
Not vaccinating your kid is criminal child abuse, and that’s how society should treat it.
@brandyzadrozny.bsky.social:
Kennedy attending the funeral for a child, the second from that community to die from measles, is particularly shocking.
I think RFK Jr gets off on the cruelty (while raking in donations from the propagandized), many MAGAts do, in Canada too, notably Danielle Quisling Smith and Harper errand boy, Piss Pants Pierre Poilievre.
@amirattaran.bsky.social:
Brain Worm takes Victory Lap
@luckytran:
Do not normalize children dying from measles. Measles was previously eliminated in the US, thanks to vaccines.
When children die from measles, it means that adults have catastrophically failed to protect them because they have rejected basic science.
@YYCCowboy:
BREAKING Alberta is now reporting 36 Mealses Cases as of Noon today. This is an increase of 9 since the weekend, and 12 since Friday.. 8 New cases reported in Central Alberta Zone. More tonight with some huge numbers with the Respiratory outbreaks as well!
Gabriel Fabreau MD, MPH, FRCPC @gabefabreau:
FYI to good people of #Alberta, given the current poor state of our #publichealth comms re: #Measles
Some facts to consider:
- Measles among most infectious airborne viruses we know of. Ro~18
- If 36 cases reported, there are really many more
- we have no treatments
- #measles considered erradicated in Canada in 1990’s & from all of America’s in 2000’s. How?
- b/c safe, effective #vaccines for decades
- highest risk now = infants <1yr not immunized, those w compromised immunity, pregnant women links to info/resources next…
It’s not just another ‘little virus’. Consequences for those at risk potentially devastating (blindness, immune system, encephalitis, stillbirth etc.)
AB health = https://alberta.ca/measles
PHAC = https://ipac-canada.org/measles
Mayo clinic for patients = https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/und
… “I haven’t seen numbers like that in my career, so it’s it’s very disturbing to see that,” she said.
Hota says lower vaccination rates could be to blame for the outbreak. …
@MirthDAL:
Ontario has Alberta beat on measles- over 600 cases so far. Even more than Texas.
US now issuing travel advisories against visiting Ontario.
The end of public health
@revjoey.bsky.social:
Any charges on the parents?
@yosemitespam.bsky.social:
·
Probably the most avoidable death imaginable. A couple of jabs and you practically have no chance of dying from it.
@blu-htx.bsky.social:
Can we get his vaccine history.
Alba Stroube @albastroube.bsky.social
His cousin Caroline Kennedy said he vaccinates his children. He’s just a grifter. Selling lies to make money.
@bridget123goooo.bsky.social:
Yes or even catching it. I mean, how many people do you know that have had the measles? In my 53 years I have known no one with measles.
@pat2000np.bsky.social:
Preventable
@emmettmacfarlane.com:
His stride is mass death.
@maximummeh.bsky.social:
Him and Musk – they’re eugenicists. Neither care about mass suffering because they don’t consider the people who suffer worthwhile or of any value.
@deonandan:
I’m quoted in this Walrus article,
“RFK Jr. Is Bad for Canada’s Health Too”
@massdisillusion.bsky.social:
Darwin is using RFK as his instrument.
god hates Republicans
@blueoregonian.bsky.social:
Republicans must be so proud. Did they thank God for this in their heretical churches today?
@lizalou06.bsky.social:
Second child in Texas murdered by their parents.Americans are proud church and assault rifle slinging kid murderers and are proud of their cruelty, religion, and stupidity. If they won’t allow guns to be sanely restricted to protect kids in schools, they sure as hell aren’t going to protect kids from preventable diseases via vaccines.
@velvetdunn4.bsky.social:
This child’s parents are at fucking fault . The fucking idiots don’t deserve to have kids.In my view, many humans don’t deserve kids given how stupidly our species is destroying earth’s livabilityI feel for the child but not the assholes that are his parents. They did this they caused his death they ket it fucking happen. Lock them up take what ever children they have, they too fucking irresponsible
@joshuaeaton.bsky.social:
I don’t think people have fully grasped that you can get measles from walking through the same room as someone who has it hours later. Most contagious disease we know.
@drvon2.bsky.social:
The R number for measles is 18. That makes it incredibly contagious. I don’t know of any diseases with such a high number
@karen-newcombe.bsky.social:
People also don’t understand just how badly measles fucks up your immune system.
@vapornoir.bsky.social:
These people with measles can’t stay the fuck home no they gotta go to the airport and the mall and the store and Disneyland and the ER first.
@pmpearson.bsky.social
It’s horrifying the harm people are willing to do to others because of their own risky behavior. It’s probably not a crime, but might be a tort and have civil liability.
@northofhome.bsky.social
Every time that fcker gets in the WH, we have a plague.
@bluestatedon.bsky.social:
Epidemiologists and other scientists have documented for many decades how rapidly measles spreads, but because anti-vaxxers and Republicans are ignorant, innumerate clods, they’re going to learn the hard, inexorable math all over again.
As a result, children will suffer and die needlessly.
@matthewherper:
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Peter Marks, the FDA’s outgoing vaccine chief, says RFK Jr.’s team wants to show vaccines aren’t safe while weakening rules on unproven treatments
Ousted Vaccine Chief Says RFK Jr.’s Team Sought Data to Justify Anti-Science Stance, Dr. Peter Marks says the new health secretary’s team wants to show vaccines aren’t safe while promoting dangerous and unproven treatments
RFK: MMR vaccine is the “most effective way” to prevent measles spread https://axios.com/2025/04/06/kennedy-measles-vaccine-texas-visit
He must do MUCH more, including apologizing for – and definitively retracting – decades of harmful lies. Also, he continues to push unproven BS.
@alexboyd.bsky.social:
Man who has spent years kicking holes in vaccine credibility now says dose is ‘most effective’ way of halting spread of measles following third death.
RFK Jr. says MMR vaccine is ‘the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles’
@travisfigures.bsky.social:
Reality comes crashing in.
RFK has done some remarkable harm already and he’s just getting started
Second child with measles dies in Texas, according to state health officials, There are currently 481 cases and 56 hospitalizations in Texas by Youri Benadjaoud and Will McDuffie, April 6, 2025, ABC News
2nd child dies of measles in TexasThere are 607 confirmed measles cases across 21 states nationwide, according to data from the CDC.
A second child in Texas has died with measles, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.
“The school-aged child who tested positive for measles was hospitalized in Lubbock and passed away on Thursday from what the child’s doctors described as measles pulmonary failure,” the statement said, in part. “The child was not vaccinated and had no reported underlying conditions.”
Earlier Sunday, hospital officials confirmed the child’s death to ABC News.
“We are deeply saddened to report that a school-aged child who was recently diagnosed with measles has passed away,” a spokesperson for the UMC Health System in Texas said in a statement to ABC News.
“The child was receiving treatment for complications of measles while hospitalized. It is important to note that the child was not vaccinated against measles and had no known underlying health conditions,” the statement continued.
A Trump administration official earlier Sunday confirmed to ABC News that the child died on Thursday.
In late February, an unvaccinated school-aged child died of measles in the Texas outbreak, according to the Texas Department of Health Services – the first measles death in the U.S. in a decade. A week later, an unvaccinated adult in New Mexico died with measles, the New Mexico Department of Health reported.
Texas is experiencing its worst measles outbreak in 30 years, with 481 cases and 56 hospitalizations. New Mexico is experiencing its worst measles outbreak in 40 years, with 54 cases. Kansas and Ohio are also experiencing outbreaks.
Nationally, there are 607 confirmed measles cases across 21 states nationwide, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which was last updated Friday. That number reflects 124 additional confirmed cases from last week’s update.
There are more than double the number of cases of measles in the U.S. in the first quarter of this year than the entirety of last year, which saw 285 cases nationwide, according to the CDC.
These are the highest number of measles cases since 2019, which saw 1,274 cases in the U.S., according to the CDC. If the number of this year’s cases continues to grow at the current rate, the U.S. would likely surpass that 2019 number, which would lead to the highest number of cases in the U.S. since 1992.
The U.S. declared measles eliminated in the year 2000 due to no continuous spread over 12 months. The country would be at risk of losing that status if an outbreak continued for more than one year. The Texas outbreak saw its first measles cases in January of this year.
The 21 states with confirmed cases include: Alaska, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, and Washington.
Among the nationally confirmed cases by the CDC, about 97% are in people who are unvaccinated or whose vaccination status is unknown, the agency said.
Of those cases, 1% are among those who received just one dose of the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) inoculation and 2% are among those who received the required two doses, according to the CDC.
The CDC currently recommends that people receive two doses of the MMR vaccine, the first at ages 12 to 15 months and the second between 4 and 6 years old. One dose is 93% effective, and two doses are 97% effective against measles.
Measles remains a danger to health even years after an infection by Maria Godoy, April 4, 2025, NPR
…
And there’s a common consequence from measles infection you might not know of: It can erase your immune memory.
“Not only does your brain have a memory, but your immune system has a memory of all the pathogens it’s encountered in the past,” says Stephen Elledge, a professor in the genetics department at Harvard Medical School who studies how the immune system responds to pathogens.
Elledge says your immune system holds on to those memories, so the next time it encounters a virus, it knows how to fight it. But measles can destroy the cells that retain those memories.
“And when you lose that memory, then you’re no longer immune to that particular pathogen,” he says. “So the next time you get it, you’ve got to fight that battle all over again.”
This effect is called immune amnesia. Elledge says it happens to some extent with every measles infection, though its severity varies widely.
“So whenever you get measles, you lose some of your immune memory. And the more severe your case of measles is, the longer it lasts, the more of your immune system is destroyed.”
In one study, Elledge and his colleagues found that unvaccinated children had lost between 11% and 73% of their antibodies, which recognize and neutralize viruses and bacteria.
Other research suggests it can take two to three years for the immune system to recover. And in the meantime, kids might be left vulnerable to infection from other diseases, including ones they had previously been immune to.
As the Texas outbreak grows, how contagious is measles, really?
Researchers say immune amnesia helps explain one phenomenon that was documented after the introduction of the measles vaccine in the 1960s: Deaths from other childhood diseases dropped dramatically. Even deaths from diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea were cut in half.
Ratner says as routine childhood vaccination rates fall, the U.S. is likely to see more and larger measles outbreaks. “There’s no doubt that we will in the future see the long-term consequences of measles,” he says.
But he says we have a safe and powerful tool to prevent those consequences — vaccines.
The American Plan to Eliminate Vaccines, The hiring of David Geier by the U.S. government to study if vaccines cause autism is another step toward getting rid of immunizations altogether by Jonathan Jarry M.Sc., 4 Apr 2025, McGill Office for Science and Society, Separating Sense from Nonsense
We don’t defend the things we take for granted. Vaccines have long been victims of their own success, but only insofar as too many people were hesitant to get them. But what if vaccines were eliminated altogether?
It’s hard to ring the alarm these days without sounding mad. The eradication of vaccines from the United States? It may seem farfetched to people who don’t pay attention to the Trump administration’s actions vis-à-vis public health, but the recent announcement that David Geier is to be a senior data analyst on a study of vaccines and autism commissioned by the American federal government is one more step toward eliminating one of humanity’s scientific triumphs.
Vaccines do not cause autism. I have recently written about how we know that vaccines are safe. You can also spend a day reading the many, many credible papers answering this question. The debate has been put to rest by the scientific community and is being kept on life support by activists who deny the consensus on this issue. They will often prop up bad studies birthed by anti-vaxxers. The problem for their credibility is that these studies do not emanate from the government of the most powerful country on Earth.
This is about to change.
Dumpster diving at the CDC
You would expect an organization called the Institute of Chronic Diseases to occupy a large glass building on a university campus, filled with people dressed in white lab coats. But the nonprofit’s yearly tax filings since 2013 show one name running the show: Dr. Mark Geier. Under “Compensation of five highest-paid employees,” we read a single word: NONE.
The self-described institute was led by Dr. Mark Geier, who according to RFK Jr’s anti-vaccine organization, Children’s Health Defense, passed away a few weeks ago. On paper, he looked like a legitimate physician-researcher: a bachelor’s degree in zoology, a doctorate in genetics, and a medical degree, all from George Washington University in D.C. His obituary on the site lists various affiliations as diplomat and co-founder of a few scientific and medical endeavours, and it notes that he is survived by “his son and tennis partner,” David.
While his father’s credentials are impressive, David’s are much shorter (and he should not be confused with Dr. David Geier, an orthopaedic surgeon). He has neither doctorate nor medical degree, but a bachelor’s of arts in biology and a few graduate-level classes. Why would David Geier be recruited by the Department of Health and Human Services to conduct a study on whether or not vaccines cause autism? Because Kennedy is not driven by curiosity but by his preexisting belief that vaccines are responsible for autism.
Pseudoscience is often steered by confirmation bias, where the conclusion comes first and the evidence must follow, otherwise it is rejected. Cherry-picking allows for small, skewed studies to be heralded as definitive proofs, while larger, rigorous trials are dismissed as coming from corrupt sources. David Geier was chosen because he will deliver the conclusion Kennedy already believes in.
Mark and David Geier have a long history of unethical research practices, the most amusing example of which may be the 2017 retraction of a paper they co-authored and which argued that conflicts of interest may explain why most studies on the vaccine-autism link failed to find an association. The twist? On top of a number of errors, the Geiers’ paper had failed to disclose, wait for it, their own conflicts of interest on this topic, chief among them that some of the paper’s authors were involved in litigation related to vaccines and autism. Indeed, the Geiers were picked as expert witnesses in hundreds of vaccine-related lawsuits, though many judges dismissed the pair for being unqualified.
But the most salient of these breaches of ethics may be what the two did in late 2003, early 2004. They had received ethics approval to go to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and access information from their Vaccine Safety Datalink, which collects data on vaccination and health outcomes. On their first visit, they tried to perform analyses of the data that had not been approved for their research project. On their second visit, they attempted to merge data files to create more complete medical records, thus increasing the risk of a breach of confidentiality, and they renamed files for removal which were not allowed to be removed. Conspiracy theorists will claim the CDC was trying to keep information secret; clinical researchers, however, know that large datasets filled with identifiable information should only be used by researchers according to strict rules. Imagine a scientist going through your own medical records willy-nilly and unsupervised, violating their own ethics-approved protocol because they’re on a mission to document something that doesn’t exist.
Now imagine David Geier being given access to an even larger dataset and receiving permission by the anti-vaxxer-in-chief to find a connection between autism and vaccines. That’s what’s on the horizon.
Dr. David Gorski, an oncologist who has devotedly tracked the modern anti-vaccine movement over the decades, calls the motivated trawling of large health databases by anti-vaccine activists “dumpster diving.” This activity is now mandated by the U.S. government.
The Geiers’ dumpster diving at the CDC, however, is just the tip of a disturbing iceberg. I haven’t even mentioned the chemical castration of autistic children.
The testosterone-mercury hypothesis
The Institute of Chronic Illnesses has its own institutional review board tasked with evaluating and approving or denying research projects involving human participants. In 2007, this board was denounced as consisting of David Geier; Mark Geier, his wife, and two of his business associates; and the mother of an autistic child who was a patient and research participant of Mark Geier’s, and the mother of another child with autism who was a plaintiff in three pending vaccine-injury claims. It should go without saying that the scientist submitting a research proposal to an ethics committee and his buddies should not sit on said committee. It turns the process into a farce.
This denunciation was provoked by a paper the Geiers were in the process of having published and which detailed what they had been up to. It turns out that they believed that autism was caused by the mercury in vaccines, and that testosterone could somehow bind to mercury and make it harder to get rid of, creating so-called “testosterone sheets” inside the body. The Geiers were thus injecting autistic children with high doses of Lupron® (also known as leuprorelin and leuprolide), which delays puberty, and then performing chelation therapy on them, where a substance is used to bind to toxins and help the body eliminate them. None of this is supported by good scientific evidence; this is dangerous pseudoscience in the service of an anti-vaccine ideology.
Pseudoscience has a patina of legitimacy, and sure enough the Geiers were running actual medical tests on their patients. Per an investigation by the Chicago Tribune, it was revealed that the Geiers would order over 50 different tests, totalling up to $12,000. If one of the testosterone-related tests revealed a value outside of the reference range, Lupron injections would be considered at a daily dose “10 times the amount American doctors use to treat precocious puberty.” Keep in mind that the more medical tests you run, the higher the odds that one of them will turn up something outside the normal range by chance alone. Tests aren’t perfect and “normal” is not always easy to define.
Eventually, the Geiers’ aberrant behaviour led to penalties. Dr. Mark Geier’s medical licenses were suspended from every state in which he had one, and his son was charged in Maryland with practicing medicine without a license and fined $10,000.
While David Geier is clearly not qualified to be running a study for the U.S. government on the subject of vaccines, he is the ideal candidate for a regime that is institutionalizing pseudoscience within its borders.
Doubt is our product
The very media outlet that broke the story of David Geier’s latest commission referred to him as a “vaccine skeptic.” Legacy media outlets are failing to meet the moment here, either because of fear of lawsuits or as a misguided attempt to appear neutral. RFK Jr received a similar sanewashing in the media. If we can’t call anti-vaxxers “anti-vaxxers,” we will be unprepared for the outcome of their crusade.
The pieces of the puzzle are there for anyone to see. Agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services—like the FDA and the CDC—are being gutted as you read these lines. The FDA’s former commissioner said of his agency that “it is finished.” Dr. Peter Marks, the FDA’s top vaccine regulator, was apparently forced out a few days ago, writing that Kennedy wanted “subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”
Meanwhile, a fake CDC website (RealCDC.org) with clear ties to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine organization mixed good science with vaccine misinformation before it was exposed and shut down. This is straight out of the Merchants of Doubt playbook: “doubt,” as one tobacco executive wrote decades ago, “is our product.” You don’t need to forcefully convince people that smoking is healthy; just make them doubt that we really know it’s harmful. The opposite can be done for vaccines.
Kennedy has announced a consolidation of divisions within his department and the creation of an Administration for a Healthy America, an Orwellian banner which echoes his “Make America Healthy Again” movement, itself a cargo cult fuelled by pseudoscience. Even more troubling is his desire to establish a vaccine injury agency within the CDC. Currently, people who think they have been injured by a mandated vaccine in the U.S. can receive compensation from the federal government. This was a way to ensure vaccines would continue to be available in the country after a wave of lawsuits in the 1980s. But will this system be maintained?
Kennedy’s institutionalization of anti-vaccine pseudoscience—meaning not just making the fringe mainstream but sanctioned by the government—could have a drastic impact on vaccine availability. Geier’s study, born out of the square one fallacy where something well established is argued to be unknown, will assuredly show a link between vaccines and autism through bad research practices. This government-commissioned study will then be used to encourage lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers—from which RFK Jr himself could financially benefit—and here is where we arrive at the final piece of the puzzle. Right now, vaccine makers benefit from the federal no-fault system compensating people believed to have been injured by a vaccine (whether they can successfully prove it or not). This protection could be eliminated.
We could subsequently see vaccine manufacturers decide to stop making vaccines for the American market because the risk of unwarranted lawsuits would be too high. The so-called free market would effectively eliminate vaccines in the United States. This is ultimately what Kennedy wants. He has, on multiple occasions, called childhood vaccines “a holocaust,” and he wants to save America from this perceived cataclysm. The outcome of this renunciation of reality will be death and disability, and with international travel, there will be spillover.
What can we do in the face of this? As science communicator and immunologist Andrea Love wrote in her newsletter, Americans can call members of Congress, vote responsibly, and support unsanitized public health journalism.
All of us, Americans or not, will need to rely on uncorrupted sources of public health information moving forward. American government websites have been captured by science deniers. We need to turn to Canadian, British, European, and international websites instead. Even PubMed, the search engine of the biomedical literature, sits under the NIH and may not be spared from the U.S. ideological purge; I recommend the bookmarking of Europe PMC and OpenAlex as alternatives. In a move that echoes Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, U.S. government websites before Trump returned to office are being preserved and made accessible to the public, through portals such as the Health Data Preservation Project, the CDC Restored, the Data Rescue Project, and the CDC.gov Archive Index.
The future looks bleak but to quote a famous fictional scientist, “Life finds a way.” So will science.
Take-home message:
– David Geier, who has neither a medical degree nor a graduate degree, has been hired by the U.S. government to do a study on whether vaccines cause autism, even though mountains of evidence have shown no such connection
– Geier and his father, the late Dr. Mark Geier, have a history of unethical research practices, including violating their own research protocol when accessing CDC data, and David Geier was charged with practicing medicine without a license in 2011
– This commissioned study is one more step toward eliminating vaccines from the United States, as RFK Jr has often called childhood vaccines “a holocaust”
A measles crisis decades in the making: How RFK Jr. helped drive America to this moment, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sits atop the very health system he spent years attacking, and he’s already chipping away at the institutions he’s been appointed to lead by Brandy Zadrozny, Mar 1, 2025, NBC News
A child in the United States has died from measles.
Just two weeks after his confirmation as Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faces the public health crisis that experts have long warned would come.
Little is known about the child, besides that they were school-age, unvaccinated and lived in an area of West Texas with a large Mennonite community, where vaccine refusal is among the highest in the country.
In another administration, the death of this child, and the growing outbreak that has sickened more than 150 across Texas and New Mexico and hospitalized 20, would likely have been met with urgent calls from the president and health secretary for parents in Texas and beyond to vaccinate their children. The measles, mumps and rubella vaccine is safe, well studied and the only effective method of preventing an illness that can cause a high fever, pneumonia and, in rare cases, brain swelling that is disabling or fatal.
But this is public health in the Kennedy era, where the secretary’s life’s work has been dismantling trust in the very vaccines that could have prevented this outbreak, and where the public official now in charge of the agencies that regulate and advise on vaccines wrote in a 2021 book that measles outbreaks had been “fabricated to create fear that in turn forces government officials to ‘do something.’”And so, at a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Kennedy’s response to the child’s death offered something else entirely: an unconcerned and casual reply.
“We are following the measles epidemic every day,” Kennedy said, adding that “incidentally, there have been four measles outbreaks this year. In this country last year there were 16. So it’s not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year.”
Kennedy then said that the hospitalized children were there “mainly for quarantine,” an assertion swiftly dismissed by the chief medical officer at the Lubbock children’s hospital where they are being treated, who described the admitted children as having difficulty breathing.
The next day, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted a statement on its website offering condolences for the child who died and outlining ways it was supporting Texas and New Mexico health agencies as the states lead the on-the-ground response. The statement included a line on vaccines as “the best defense against measles infection” but did not urge the public to get vaccinated. A day after that, Kennedy posted a similar note to his official account on X, concluding, “Ending the measles outbreak is a top priority for me and my extraordinary team at HHS.”
The White House and HHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Despite Kennedy’s claims, the death of a child from measles — while common in countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia — is unusual here. And Kennedy is an unusual HHS secretary.The U.S. officially eliminated the measles in 2000, and the last time a child died was over two decades ago: a 13-year-old boy with a chronic immune disorder who had recently undergone a bone marrow transplant. Around the same time, Kennedy, an environmental lawyer then known for his public battle with heroin addiction, was diving down the anti-vaccine rabbit hole and quickly becoming the movement’s de facto leader and its most vocal purveyor of misinformation.
Dr. Vincent Iannelli, a pediatrician in Rockwall, Texas, a five-hour drive from the current outbreak, has been debunking Kennedy’s claims since 2016 on his website Vaxopedia. Early on, Kennedy focused on thimerosal, a preservative, but after it was removed from most childhood vaccines in 2001, Iannelli said Kennedy shifted to other ingredients, known and unknown, falsely blaming them for myriad childhood illnesses.
Iannelli said Kennedy’s books were too abundantly wrong to be fact-checked in full, so he settled for blogging on the “first five lies” he found in each, noting he never got past the third page.
“It was all lies and misinformation,” Iannelli said.
Over the past 20 years, Kennedy, as head of the group he led, Children’s Health Defense, has been found in the places where measles threatened children most, often cinematically amplifying his anti-vaccine rhetoric through a bullhorn to the most vulnerable: to Minnesota’s Somali refugee community in the midst of a 2017 outbreak, to New York’s capital in 2019 where he urged lawmakers to weaken school vaccine mandates amid another outbreak, and that same year to Samoa, where he lobbied the prime minister to reconsider the mass vaccination campaign that ultimately stopped a measles outbreak, but not before it sickened thousands and killed 83, mostly small children.https://iframe.nbcnews.com/53z5ia7?_showcaption=true&=1&layout=fixed-height#amp=1
During his decades 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 an organization built around the false idea that vaccines cause autism, he attacked the CDC as a “cesspool of corruption,” filled with profiteers who knowingly harm children, and likened scientists to Nazi guards. According to Kennedy, drugmakers, the government, the media and the entire scientific community are covering up the threat vaccines pose to children.But it wasn’t until Covid that Kennedy found a mainstream audience for his anti-vaccine ideas. In 2022, Children’s Health Defense, after quadrupling its annual revenue over the course of the pandemic, heralded the “silver lining” of a virus that had killed over 1 million Americans: Childhood vaccine rates were also plummeting. Kennedy then took his ideas on the road in a failed presidential run that appealed to a coalition of anti-vaccine activists, wellness influencers and disaffected libertarians — ultimately drawing the attention and partnership of Donald Trump, who embraced his former rival as a figurehead and rallying force for what Kennedy branded MAHA (Make America Healthy Again), a coalition skeptical of government and public health institutions.
“MAHA is a position that is anti-science and anti-public health,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of public health law at Georgetown University. “The through line of all of it is a war against science and career scientists that have kept America healthy and safe for more than a half century.”
Now, Kennedy sits atop the very system he spent decades attacking, responsible for the nation’s health policy and already chipping away at the institutions he’s been appointed to lead.
His first two weeks have been busy. His short tenure has been marked by mass firings of CDC personnel, many tasked with disease detection and outbreak response; the cancellation of a Food and Drug Administration advisory committee meeting that would have selected the virus strains for next season’s flu vaccine (he has said he suspects a disorder that strains his vocal cords was caused by the flu vaccine); the indefinite postponement of a CDC advisory committee that votes on recommendations for childhood vaccine schedules; the cancellation of pro-vaccination advertising campaigns, reportedly shifting the focus from the danger of diseases like flu to the potential risks of vaccines; and a proposal that HHS end notice and comment procedures for rules related to “public property, loans, grants, benefits, or contracts,” a policy that seems to run counter to his promise for “radical transparency” at the agency.
His supporters in the anti-vaccine movement couldn’t be prouder.
Del Bigtree, head of the anti-vaccine group the Informed Consent Action Network, leaders at Children’s Health Defense and dozens of other prominent anti-vaccine influencers have rallied to Kennedy’s defense since news of the measles death in Texas. They have argued a single death, while devastating, does not constitute a public health crisis and that public attention would be better spent on other threats.
Bigtree devoted a segment to the Texas outbreak on his internet TV show “The HighWire” on Thursday. In an interview with a Long Island pediatrician well known for encouraging parents not to vaccinate, Bigtree ran through the usual script — downplaying the outbreak, questioning whether measles was truly the cause of death for the Texas child, and pushing unproven treatments like vitamin A over vaccines. He ended with a satisfied nod to the administration. “Our guy is now head of HHS,” Bigtree said.
For public health experts, though, Kennedy’s earliest actions are a warning.“I think this is the beginning,” said Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who serves on the FDA vaccine advisory committee whose meeting was canceled this week.
“When I saw a picture of Kennedy sitting in front of the big emblem that said Department of Health and Human Services, that to me was the beginning of a horror movie,” said Offit, the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine. “And I cannot believe it will last. I cannot believe that someone who has an anti-public health stance like he has, can last. Because measles is coming to get him.”
Whether Kennedy’s reign could be upended by his response to a measles epidemic remains to be seen. But if this is just the beginning, the question may be: Now that an anti-vaccine activist wields influence over the nation’s food, medicine and health infrastructure, where will he aim next?