What began as a deadly measles outbreak in Texas is starting to spread. Common sense suggests the Cabinet secretary who leads the Department of Health and Human Services would take the matter seriously and make every effort to respond effectively.
That’s clearly not happening.
At a White House Cabinet meeting nearly two weeks ago, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. addressed the public health threat, and over the course of roughly a minute, he misstated the number of deaths, mischaracterized the nature of the quarantine and downplayed the significance of the outbreak in ways that didn’t make a lot of sense. He soon after left for a hiking trip.
Politico reported last week, “To his critics and even some increasingly concerned allies, the episode epitomized the worryingly casual attitude that Kennedy has taken in public toward managing the first major health crisis on his watch, according to a half-dozen current and former administration officials, outside advisers and other public health officials.”
Kennedy also spoke to Fox Nation for a fairly long interview, and as The New York Times noted, the HHS secretary “outlined a strategy for containing the measles outbreak in West Texas that strayed far from mainstream science, relying heavily on fringe theories about prevention and treatments.”
He issued a muffled call for vaccinations in the affected community, but said the choice was a personal one. He suggested that measles vaccine injuries were more common than known, contrary to extensive research. He asserted that natural immunity to measles, gained through infection, somehow also protected against cancer and heart disease, a claim not supported by research. He cheered on questionable treatments like cod liver oil, and said that local doctors had achieved ‘almost miraculous and instantaneous’ recoveries with steroids or antibiotics.
Writing for MSNBC, Dr. Kavita Patel, a teaching professor of medicine at Stanford University, added that Kennedy, as part of his Fox interview, abandoned “any pretense of scientific rigor.” She added that the HHS secretary promoted “pseudoscientific alternatives.”
This follows a report in The Washington Post about Kennedy focusing on vitamin A to combat the growing measles outbreak, “raising concerns among public health experts, who fear he is sending the wrong message about preventing the highly contagious disease and distracting from the critical importance of vaccination.”
All of this is, of course, dreadful. But it is not surprising. Kennedy wrote just four years ago that he believed measles outbreaks “have been fabricated to create fear.” He added that, as far he’s concerned, Americans had been “misled … into believing that measles is a deadly disease.”
Kennedy is also on record suggesting there might be some health benefits to getting the dangerous contagion.
Obviously, the HHS secretary has earned reproach for his reckless and anti-scientific approach to this growing public health threat. It’s equally obvious that qualified physicians, scientists and public health officials are right to ring the alarm about Kennedy’s dangerous irresponsibility.
But when assigning blame, spare a thought for the 52 Republican senators who decided to put aside everything they learned about Kennedy and voted to confirm him anyway.
That an unqualified, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist is behaving like an unqualified, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist is painfully predictable. The fact remains, however, that 52 GOP senators were given an opportunity to protect Americans from RFK Jr. and they failed spectacularly.
