RFK Jr and the measles outbreak
Now he’s health secretary, not a gadfly, as unvaxxed children are hospitalised.
The Senate voted 52-48 last week to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr as the nation’s health secretary. In other news, 13 people in Texas were hospitalised for measles amid an outbreak of 48 cases, almost all in children whose vaccination status is negative or unknown. That was as of Friday morning. “Due to the highly contagious nature of this disease,” the Texas health department said, “additional cases are likely.”
The tragedy is that this doesn’t have to keep happening. In 2000 measles was declared eliminated from the US, meaning 12 months with no continuous spread. Immunisation has saved millions of lives around the world since the vaccine became available in 1963. The peril isn’t small. “About one in five unvaccinated people in the US who get measles is hospitalised,” according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. “Nearly one to three of every 1000 children who become infected with measles will die.”
Yet for some people, the reality of measles feels like a sepia-toned history lesson, whereas the anti-vax hooey featured on podcasts these days sounds current. RFK Jr, an environmental lawyer by trade, has long been part of the problem, and at his Senate confirmation hearings he presented himself as just asking questions, man. That undersells his role in spreading doubt and confusion.
“Two doses of MMR vaccine” – for measles, mumps and rubella – “are 97 per cent effective at preventing measles,” the CDC says. But coverage is sliding. For the 2023-24 school year, the national estimate was 92.7 per cent of kindergarteners had two MMR doses, down from 95.2 per cent in 2019-20. An intervening shock was Covid-19, and there were bound to be consequences after health authorities burned their pandemic credibility.
Restoring confidence matters, particularly since these trends have longer and deeper causes. In Gaines County, Texas, where the measles outbreak is centred, state statistics show MMR coverage for kindergarteners is 82 per cent. Texas law lets parents opt out of school vaccine mandates for “reasons of conscience.” In Gaines, 17.6 per cent of kindergarteners have filed a “conscientious exemption” to at least one shot. For Texas as a whole, that number has climbed to 3.6 per cent. A decade ago, it was 1.3 per cent.
This is courting heartache that parents used to face routinely but that modern medicine has made unthinkable for most. We are on record as sceptical of RFK Jr’s nomination. The Senate confirmed him. Now the best-case scenario would be for Mr Kennedy to internalise that he is no longer an activist outsider who needs to take provocative potshots to get attention.
He’s the nation’s health secretary, and there are children in the hospital with measles who shouldn’t have to be there.
The Wall Street Journal
