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 now he faces his first big challenge: a deadly measles outbreak in West Texas.
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.
Signs point the way to measles testing in Seminole, Texas, on Thursday.Jan Sonnenmair / Getty ImagesBut 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.
Rating: 5