A young girl who was not vaccinated for measles died tragically and unnecessarily earlier this week in Texas — the first such fatality in the United States in a decade. More than 100 people in western Texas have become infected with a disease that, back in 2000, was declared eradicated from the United States.
And what was the response of our new Secretary of Health and Human Services?
“It’s not unusual; we have measles outbreaks every year,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cavalierly said. He insisted during a news conference that children currently hospitalized in Texas with measles are there for quarantine purposes.
Not so, according to Texas pediatrician Dr. Laura Johnson, chief medical officer at Covenant Children’s, which is treating about 20 unvaccinated patients: “This is the first time I’ve had any professional experience with a measles outbreak … we really thought that we’d eradicated measles from the United States and didn’t have any anticipation of seeing any outbreaks here.”
Kennedy despicably wrote in his “The Measles Book,” published by his anti-vaccine nonprofit, that “measles outbreaks have been fabricated to create fear” and that government officials “inflict unnecessary and risky vaccines on millions of children for the sole purpose of fattening industry profits.”
Infections and deaths from measles are entirely preventable by vaccination. Measles is the most infectious of childhood diseases. The airborne virus remains in the air for up to two hours and spreads through breath, sneezes and coughs. One or two children out of every 1,000 infected with measles will die, and there are other severe complications. Almost half of those infected with measles last year were hospitalized, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (And how long will the CDC’s website be available as a resource on infectious disease?)
The epicenter of the outbreak is the Mennonite community in Gaines County, where the child died, a community that historically has been undervaccinated. Texas is among the many states that unwisely allow religious exemptions from mandatory vaccination policies for public school students. (States that don’t allow nonmedical exemptions include California, Connecticut, Maine and New York.) The outbreak is now spreading to New Mexico.
Although about 82 percent of the county’s population had received the combination measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, herd immunity requires that at least 95 percent be vaccinated. The CDC reports that just under 93 percent of kindergarten children nationwide received the MMR vaccine in the 2023-24 school year. Much of the trepidation is due to disinformation campaigns by Kennedy and other science deniers.
“It is despicable that the U.S. Senate — with only polio survivor Mitch McConnell dissenting among Republicans — confirmed a reckless disinformation purveyor like Kennedy to oversee U.S. public health,” comments Annie Laurie Gaylor, Freedom From Religion Foundation co-president. Kennedy’s unforgivable role in the death of 80 Samoan children in a measles outbreak there was ignored. Gaylor points out that even Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician who had publicly promoted vaccinations ever since a young patient almost died of hepatitis B, voted for Kennedy instead of for children’s safety.
Our nation is facing an increasingly severe bird flu outbreak and now a measles outbreak, but the man in charge, who thinks he’s on a mission from God, has vowed to give “infectious disease a break for about eight years.”
Kennedy has been in office only a few days, and the national health disasters have already started.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with more than 40,000 members nationwide. FFRF’s purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between church and state, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
