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During a Trump administration cabinet meeting, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared to downplay an ongoing measles outbreak in Texas that has killed a child and resulted in over 120 cases of the disease since January.
“We are following the measles epidemic every day,” Kennedy said during the meeting. “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.”
He described those hospitalized as part of the outbreak centered near Gaines County as “mainly for quarantine,” though a local official said otherwise.
Dr. Lara Johnson, chief medical officer at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, told NBC News that all of the roughly 20 children she’s treated so far have had trouble breathing and none were vaccinated.
An unvaccinated, school-aged child died from the outbreak, the Texas Department of State Health Services announced on Wednesday.
It’s the first measles death in the U.S. since 2015, all the more notable because the disease was considered eliminated in the U.S. as of 2000 given widespread vaccination.
Kennedy, during his time as an anti-vaccine activist at Children’s Health Defense, wrote in the forward to a 2021 book that Americans have “been misled by the pharmaceutical industry and their captured government agency allies into believing that measles is a deadly vaccine and that measles vaccines are necessary, safe, and effective.”
He added that “measles outbreaks have been fabricated to create fear.”
A 2019 measles outbreak that killed 83 people in Samoa around the time Kennedy visited the country was a key sticking point in the official’s confirmation hearing.
Kennedy told the Senate his visit to the island was unrelated to vaccines and instead about promoting improvements to local health informatics, and that, “My words had nothing to do with vaccine uptake in Samoa or with the 2019 epidemic.”
He also claimed that “we don’t know what was killing” the individuals who died in the outbreak.
“It’s a total fabrication,” Samoa Director-General of Health Dr. Alec Ekeroma told The Associated Press after Kennedy’s comments.
Kennedy’s trip was organized by an anti-vaccine influencer, and an anti-vaccine advocate later said he got advice from individuals assembled by Kennedy during the trip to encourage alternative treatments.
Prior to Kennedy being confirmed, public health experts warned that the official could contribute to the growing trend of Americans opting out of vaccines for common illnesses.
Trump’s former surgeon general Dr. Jerome Adams has said Kennedy could “spread misinformation and take us back to the dark ages in regards to vaccine-preventable diseases.”
