After a second unvaccinated child tragically and avoidably died from measles in Texas last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy ostentatiously flew to the state to attend her funeral on Sunday. His gesture is far too little, much too late.
The 8-year-old, identified only as “Daisy,” lived in Gaines County, Texas, the hub of the measles outbreak where many undervaccinated Mennonites live and a 6-year-old died earlier this year. Seemingly searching his conscience, Kennedy publicly said, “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.”
However, Kennedy’s crisis of conscience was short-lived. According to the Washington Post, he soon followed that statement with praise for two Texas physicians as “extraordinary healers” for using steroids and antibiotics that are not recommended treatments for measles.
One of them, Richard Bartlett, was disciplined by Texas medical regulators for inappropriate use of steroid and antibacterial treatments. The second praised physician, Ben Edwards, said in a podcast earlier this year that the measles outbreak was “God’s version of measles immunization.” He added, “Go get a green juice, or just drink some water with a pinch of sea salt and go sit outside and listen to a bird chirp,” Edwards said. “It sounds crazy, but it’s the basics. It’s what our ancestors knew.”
Yes, it sounds crazy — since it is crazy.
Measles is one of the most infectious diseases known to humans, often accompanied by the tell-tale rash and fevers as high as 104 degrees. Respiratory symptoms include frightening complications that result in one in five unvaccinated individuals with measles needing hospitalization, one in 20 contracting pneumonia, which killed Daisy, and one child out of every 1,000 contracting encephalitis, which can lead to convulsions, deafness and intellectual disability. Between one and three of every 1,000 children infected with measles will die. Measles is so contagious that nine in 10 unvaccinated persons close to the infected person will be infected.
Thanks to what has widely been described as a “bloodletting” — the firing of 10,000 Health and Human Services employees in late March on top of 10,000 earlier layoffs — the public health response has been debilitated. NBC News reports that dozens of free measles vaccine clinics in Texas have closed as $11.4 billion in federal funding has been cut. Federal health agencies have lost 20,000 employees since DOGE began its cuts and forced retirements. HHS announced that it would “no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a nonexistent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.”
Nevertheless, Kennedy talked up his empty gesture to attend a funeral that should never have occurred, had he been doing his job. Instead, he congratulated himself on traveling to the funeral and specifically the Reinlander Mennonite Church, where he said he bonded with “other members of this community during that difficult time.”
Vaccines can prevent measles, but sadly there is no vaccine to prevent dangerous quack views.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters of nontheism. With 42,000 members, FFRF advocates for freethinkers’ rights across the globe.
