During Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings for health secretary, Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, practically begged him to acknowledge, however grudgingly, that vaccines don’t cause autism. It was the easiest layup ever, but Kennedy just wouldn’t go there. Maybe not so surprising, given that he had previously told a podcaster that he considers it his duty to tell random strangers that they shouldn’t vaccinate their babies. Cassidy, a medical doctor by training, voted to confirm him anyway.
Since then, Kennedy has had a lot to say about the need to investigate the childhood vaccinations schedule (“nothing is going to be off limits”), claiming that despite decades of widespread use and study it had somehow been “insufficiently scrutinized.” He stopped a sensible public awareness campaign during one of the most severe flu seasons ever, and canceled a key vaccine committee meeting, which may endanger the availability of flu vaccines next year. And he talked about instituting an “informed consent” model for parents that emphasizes vaccines’ possible side effects and no doubt would discourage the vaccinations that have protected Americans from the ravages of infectious disease that in earlier centuries were just a standard part of life.
I might run out of not just column space but an entire newspaper if I tried to list all the false and misleading claims Kennedy made about vaccines in his many speeches and books. Even so, I was shocked this week as I watched him brush off the Texas outbreak as no big deal. The situation there is “not unusual,” he said, even as he doubled the known death toll without explanation. About 20 people have been hospitalized, he said, “mainly for quarantine,” a fact that the chief medical officer of the Lubbock hospital where the child died quickly refuted. “We’re watching it,” Kennedy said, with a casual wave of the hand.
You can probably guess which word he didn’t say.
During a deadly outbreak, we’d ordinarily hope for a clear, direct call for parents to vaccinate their children. But this is the man who, during a 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people (79 of them children), actively worked to undermine public trust in the one thing that would have helped most. America, brace yourself.
Right now, the United States has an official verification from the World Health Organization as a measles-free country, which makes it easier for its residents to travel abroad. If these outbreaks continue we may lose that designation, and other countries may begin to require proof of measles vaccination before letting Americans enter. That choice would be hard to argue with.
