A child in the United States has died from measles.
Only two weeks after his confirmation as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faces the public health crisis that experts have warned for a long time.
Little is known about the child, in addition to being school age, not vaccinated and lived in an area of western Texas with a large Mennonite community, where the vaccine’s refusal is among the highest in the country.
In another administration, the death of this child and the growing outbreak that has ill to more than 150 in Texas and New Mexico and Hospitalized 20, would probably have been received with urgent calls from the president and secretary of health of the parents in Texas and beyond to vaccinate their children. The measles, paper and rubella vaccine is safe, well studied and the only effective method to prevent a disease that can cause 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 life of the secretary’s life has been dismantling the confidence in the same vaccines that could have avoided this outbreak, and where the public official now in charge of the agencies that regulate and warn about vaccines wrote in a 2021 book that the sarampos outbreaks had been “manufactured to create the fear that the governments of turns do something” “.” “
And so, at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Kennedy’s response to the child’s death offered something completely: an informal response and without worry.
“We are following the measles epidemic every day,” Kennedy said, and added that “by the way, there have been four measles outbreaks this year. In this country last year there were 16. Therefore, it is not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year.”
Kennedy then said that hospitalized children were there “mainly by quarantine”, a statement quickly dismissed by the medical director of Lubbock Children’s Hospital, where they are being treated, who described the children admitted as breathing difficulties.
The next day, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a statement on their website that offered condolences for the child who died and described ways in which he was supporting the health agencies of Texas and New Mexico as states lead the response on the ground. The statement included a line on vaccines as “the best defense against measles infection”, but did not urged the public to vaccinate. A day after that, Kennedy published a note similar to his official X account, concluding: “Finishing measles outbreak is a priority for me and my extraordinary team in HHS.”
The White House and HHS did not immediately respond to comments requests.
Despite Kennedy’s claims, the death of a measles child, although it is common in the countries of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, is unusual here. And Kennedy is an unusual HHS secretary.
The United States officially eliminated measles in 2000, and the last time a child died it was more than two decades ago: a 13 -year -old boy with a chronic immune disorder that had recently undergone a bone marrow transplant. Almost at the same time, Kennedy, an environmental lawyer known for his public battle with heroin addiction, was immersing the Anti -Vacuna burrow and quickly becoming the de facto leader of the movement and his most vocal disinformation provider.
Dr. Vincent Iannelli, a pediatrician in Rockwall, Texas, five hours from the current outbreak, has discredit Kennedy’s claims since 2016 on his Vaxopedia website. At first, Kennedy focused on the thimerosal, a preservative, but after the majority of children’s vaccines were eliminated in 2001, Iannelli said that Kennedy changed to other ingredients, known and unknown, blaming them falsely by innumerable children’s diseases.
Iannelli said that Kennedy’s books were too wrong to verify the fate in its entirety, so he settle for blogging in the “first five lies” he found in each one, and pointed out that he never exceeded the third page.
“Everything was lies and misinformation,” said Iannelli.
In the last 20 years, Kennedy, as head of the group he directed, the defense of children’s health, has been found in places where measles threatened children, often amplifying cinematically their anti -cacuna rhetoric through an ox In 2019 in 2019 to the life of the mandates of the Law of the Law of 2017, in the mid -mandates of the 2017 mandates, in the middle of the mandates of the Law of the Law of the Law of the Law of 2017, in the mid -mandates of the mandates of the Law of the Law of the Law of New York, in the middle of the mandates of the mandates of the law of the law of the mandates of New York. Another outbreak, and that same year to Samoa, where he pressed the prime minister to reconsider the mass vaccination campaign that finally stopped a measles outbreak, but not before he became ill thousands and killed 83, mostly young children.
During his decades of activism, Kennedy has made it clear who believes that they are the villains in their vaccine conspiracy theories. In the main directions in the annual conferences for an organization built around the false idea that vaccines cause autism, it attacked CDC as a “corruption well”, full of deposits that damage children knowingly and compared scientists to Nazis guards. According to Kennedy, drug manufacturers, government, media and the entire scientific community are covering threat vaccines for children.
But it was not even Covid that Kennedy found a conventional audience for his anti -cacamia ideas. In 2022, the defense of children’s health, after quadruplying their annual income during the pandemic, announced the “silver lining” of a virus that had killed more than 1 million Americans: children’s vaccine rates were also bitter. Kennedy then took his ideas on the road in a failed presidential race that appealed to a coalition of anti -cacamian activists, well -being and libertarian influencers, which finally attracted the attention and association of Donald Trump, who embraced his former rival as a researcher and the concentration force for what Kennedy marked the brand (make the United States skeptical coalition and public health and public health institutions.
“Maha is an anti-public health position and health,” said Lawrence Gostin, professor of Public Health Law at Georgetown University. “The line of everything is a war against science and career scientists who have kept healthy and safe United States for more than half a century.”
Now, Kennedy sits at the top of the system that spent decades attacking, responsible for the nation’s health policy and is already attacking the institutions that has been designated to lead.
His first two weeks have been occupied. His brief mandate has been marked by massive shots of the CDC staff, many in charge of disease detection and outbreak response; The cancellation of a meeting of the Advisory Committee of the Food and Drug Administration that would have selected the strains of the virus for the flu of next season (he has said that he suspects a disorder that stops his vocal cords caused by the flu vaccine); the indefinite postponement of an advisory committee of the CDC that votes on the recommendations for children’s vaccine schedules; The cancellation of pro-vacunation advertising campaigns, according to reports, changing the approach to the danger of diseases such as flu to the potential risks of vaccines; And a proposal that the HHS ends the notification and comments procedures for rules related to “public property, loans, subsidies, benefits or contracts”, a policy that seems to be contrary to its promise of “radical transparency” in the agency.
His supporters in the anti -cacuna movement could not be more proud.
Del Bigree, head of the antivacamic group, the informed consent action network, the leaders of Children’s Health Defense and dozens of other outstanding anti -vaccinos influencers have joined Kennedy’s defense from the news of the death of measles in Texas. They have argued a single death, although devastating, does not constitute a public health crisis and that public care would be better spent on other threats.
Bigree dedicated a segment to Texas outbreak on his Internet television program “The Highwire” on Thursday. In an interview with a Long Island pediatrician well known for encouraging parents not to be vaccinated, Bigree ran through the usual script: minimize the outbreak, question if measles was really the cause of death for Texas’s child and boost treatments not proven such as vitamin A on vaccines. He ended with a wink satisfied with the administration. “Our boy is now HHS head,” Bigree said.
However, for public health experts, Kennedy’s first actions are a warning.
“I think this is the beginning,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center of Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, who serves in the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee whose meeting was canceled this week.
“When I saw a photo of Kennedy sitting in front of the great emblem that the Department of Health and Human Services said, which for me was the beginning of a horror movie,” said Offit, co-inventor of a vaccine against Rotavirus. “And I can’t believe it lasts. I cannot believe that someone who has an anti-public health posture like him can last. Because measles comes to look for it. “
It remains to be seen if Kennedy’s reign could be overturned for his response to a measles epidemic. But if this is only the beginning, the question can be: now that an anti -vacuine activist influences the infrastructure of food, medicines and health of the nation, where will it point below?
