The nation's top vaccine denier, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is being overrun by current events and scrambling to contain the fallout. Specifically, a terrible measles outbreak in Texas has now spread to a neighboring county in New Mexico and surged to 146 cases as of Monday. Measles cases have also been confirmed in other states, including Pennsylvania. Most of the affected Texas patients are unvaccinated children; one child has died.
It's been alarming to see RFK Jr. flailing about as this measles outbreak, the first in Texas in three decades, continues to spread. After weeks of downplaying the severity – measles is life-threatening and highly contagious – RFK Jr. finally advocated for the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine in an online op-ed on Fox News Sunday. Sort of. He's still stating that getting vaccinated is a "personal choice," but he was at least acknowledging the benefits of the MMR vaccine.
Alas, it was short-lived. A day or two later, though, he was on Fox News promoting vitamin A, cod liver oil, and steroids for treatment of measles. Yikes.
Health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention haven't been helpful either, as they delayed sending out information about the Texas outbreak for a month, as the New York Times reported. (The CDC is under the Health and Human Services Department.)
But RFK Jr. inching closer to the measles vaccine is an improvement from comments he made at President Donald Trump's first cabinet meeting last week, when he said measles outbreaks were "not unusual."
"Classifying it as 'not unusual' would be inaccurate," said Dr. Christina Johns, a pediatric emergency physician at PM Pediatrics in Annapolis, Maryland, as CNN reported. "Usually [an outbreak] is in the order of a handful, not over 100 people that we have seen recently with this latest outbreak in West Texas."
Another physician also told the network that Kennedy was wrong.
"This is not usual," said Dr. Philip Huang, director of the Dallas County Health and Human Services Department. "Fortunately, it's not usual, and it's been because of the effectiveness of the vaccine."
Measles was eliminated in the U.S. in 2020, meaning no outbreaks occurred for a year or more since then, as the CDC noted.
RFK Jr.'s anti-science outlook is already proving to be damaging for Americans. And he's only been on the job a few weeks.
We hope people across the country check their vaccination status for measles with their physicians and get the series of two shots if recommended. The vaccinations are 97% effective. Most U.S. adults were vaccinated when they were children, but it's possible that another round of shots is necessary, as we've learned ourselves. The vaccination rate has been declining in recent years because of people like RFK Jr. who believe in junk science and debunked scientific articles.
Speaking of pro-science advocacy, San Francisco will be the site of the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections next week. The San Francisco AIDS Foundation's HIV Advocacy Network and scientists will hold a rally at 6 p.m. Monday, March 10, at Yerba Buena Gardens to support HIV research programs. A news release noted that this research is threatened by the Trump administration's attempts to freeze federal funding and make deep cuts to critical research programs that advance cutting-edge treatment and cures.
Many major universities that serve as research hubs have decried these proposed budget cuts and the chaos surrounding them, which is nothing new for the Trump administration. Forbes reported this week that Stanford University is freezing spending as support for biomedical research remains in doubt. Others are pulling back on Ph.D. admissions, the publication reported.
The Associated Press reported the new National Institutes of Health policy would strip research groups of hundreds of millions of dollars to cover so-called indirect expenses of studying Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease, and a host of other illnesses – anything from clinical trials of new treatments to basic lab research that is the foundation for discoveries.
A federal judge has twice blocked the Trump administration from making the research cuts, according to the news service. But whatever decision Judge Angel Kelley (a Joe Biden appointee) makes likely will be appealed. And we know how the U.S. Supreme court views presidential power; the justices gave Trump broad immunity for "official acts" in a landmark case last year.
These NIH cuts would be a disaster for HIV/AIDS research, as well as other diseases. However, it's not surprising that the administration wants to decimate health research and why Trump selected RFK Jr. to be the health secretary.
As we noted in an editorial after Trump nominated him, RFK Jr. does not believe that HIV causes AIDS. In 2021, he wrote in his book "The Real Anthony Fauci" that "heavy recreational drug use in gay men and drug addicts was the real cause of immune deficiency." Though that was an early theory as to the origins of AIDS, it was debunked over four decades ago. In a fact sheet, GLAAD stated that RFK Jr. has attributed the disease to factors such as recreational drug use, particularly amyl nitrite ("poppers"), and lifestyle stressors. Later in the book, co-published by the Children's Health Defense, an anti-vaccination group that RFK Jr. once led, he wrote several times that he is "neutral" on whether HIV causes AIDS, as Managed Healthcare Executive noted in a January article. But this is disingenuous and a form of AIDS denialism, a fringe belief that has been thoroughly debunked by the scientific community. One can't be neutral on scientific evidence.
We see all of this as connected. Lower vaccination numbers bring back diseases that were once eradicated. Cuts in medical research lead to vital work not being done, and feeds into public distrust about the entire health infrastructure. Meanwhile, people living with diseases like HIV/AIDS worry that the next medical breakthrough may not come, potentially depriving them and future generations of better medications or treatment. All of this is not going to "make America great again." Rather, if these drastic funding cuts are realized, they will result in the U.S. falling behind in regard to possible life-changing medical advances.
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