“It’s not unusual.” That’s how Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist and secretary of Health and Human Services, described an ongoing measles outbreak in and around Texas that has already infected more than 100 people and killed one child. This incident is, in fact, unusual. Until this week, someone hadn’t died of measles in this country since 2015, and endemic spread of the virus was declared eliminated in the United States 25 years ago. As the leader of our health-care system, Kennedy could have used his political megaphone to encourage vaccination. But he is a vocal critic of the measles shot, which has saved more than 90 million lives, and has claimed (with very modest evidence) that catching measles may reduce the risk of heart disease and certain cancers. In keeping with those views, he has passed on the opportunity.
Kennedy’s “Make America healthy again” (MAHA) movement is not content with simply ignoring the need for vaccination. It also has a habit of dismissing pediatric death and disability. Kennedy, in particular, has spent years downplaying the harms of vaccine-preventable illnesses. In a 2021 podcast appearance, he described the time when he contracted measles as a kid as “a great week.” “The treatment for measles is chicken soup and vitamin A,” he told the host. Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group that Kennedy formerly chaired, has in recent months spent its time “fact-checking” the fact that the polio vaccine has saved 20 million kids from paralysis. Last week, that organization suggested on X that the Texas measles outbreak was caused not by the virus but by the vaccine. (This is impossible.) And yesterday, Calley Means, one of Kennedy’s key advisers, complained that journalists were paying too much attention to that outbreak. “MSNBC has turned into the Measles News Network,” he wrote on X. “Does the media know children are dying from chronic diseases (not measles)?”
The school-aged child who died in Lubbock, Texas, appears to be interfering with the MAHA argument that public health focuses too much on preventing infection and too little on combatting chronic disease. The movement’s emphasis on chronic illness has generally been a political success. Deaths from COVID-19 have declined dramatically, but cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and other long-term conditions remain a scourge on the adult population. When it comes to young people, however, MAHA’s argument makes less sense. “Just 400 Americans PER YEAR died of measles before invention of the vaccine—and many of those deaths certainly tied to co-morbidities,” Means posted on X this month. “Obesity, autism and diabetes are ravaging every classroom, but no articles on that.” There are, of course, “articles on that.” And yet, even a chronic disease like diabetes, however bad it may be, kills fewer than 100 American children and teenagers per year.
(Kennedy, Means, and Children’s Health Defense did not respond to written questions about their statements on vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases.)
It is only on account of vaccination, medical care, and sanitation that infections are no longer killing so many U.S. children. Most deaths of U.S. kids today result from external injuries—motor-vehicle crashes, firearms, drug overdoses, suffocation, and drowning. As for chronic illnesses, one of them, hepatitis B, has been nearly eliminated in American children thanks in part to an immunization that Kennedy also criticizes. Another chronic childhood condition—and the most deadly one—is cancer. So far, at least, the fight against pediatric cancers has been set back by the administration in which Kennedy is serving. Over the past 50 years, medicine has made miraculous advances in treating leukemia and other cancers affecting kids, largely due to research supported by the National Institutes of Health. Yet this month, the White House has taken several different steps to interfere with the NIH’s funding. Harold Varmus, who ran the agency for much of the 1990s, and then the National Cancer Institute during the 2010s, has predicted that if the recent political undermining of American science continues, “our envisioned future of longer, healthier lives will happen more slowly, in other countries, or not at all.”
[Read: Inside the collapse at the NIH]
And notwithstanding Kennedy’s plan, as laid out during his presidential run, to ask the NIH to “give infectious disease a break,” infections were, in fact, recently a leading killer of children: From August 2021 to July 2022, COVID was a top-10 cause of pediatric mortality in the United States. In absolute numbers, these deaths still paled in comparison with deaths among adults, but Kennedy and his supporters tended to dismiss the problem out of hand. There is “no evidence children are at risk of serious illness,” Kennedy wrote in 2022. Means chastised the social-media account for a Sesame Street character after it promoted COVID shots. “8x more kids kill themselves than die of COVID,” he told Big Bird on X in 2021. (There is not yet a vaccine that prevents suicide.)
In this way, COVID minimizers often become de facto advocates for the virus. They excuse its harms by shifting blame to comorbidities such as obesity. Kennedy’s response to the measles outbreak, like those of others in his movement, hints that this unusual degree of apathy is likely to continue.
