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In Donald Trump’s first Cabinet meeting of his second term, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. downplayed the severity of a measles outbreak in South Texas that has already caused the first death attributed to the deadly virus in the U.S. since 2015.
During Tuesday’s meeting, Kennedy was asked to comment on the death of a school-aged child in Texas who contracted the virus. So far, at least 124 people have been infected in the outbreak, and the Texas Department of Health reports that at least 18 patients have been hospitalized.
“We’re watching it, and there are about 20 people hospitalized, mainly for quarantine,” Kennedy said. “We put out a post on it yesterday, and we’re going to continue to follow it.”
Kennedy added that “incidentally, there have been four measles outbreaks this year in this country — last year over 16. So it’s not unusual to have measles outbreaks every year.”
Kennedy, a known vaccine conspiracy theorist, has a long history downplaying the threat of measles, and is misrepresenting its prevalence in the United States.
In 2000, almost 40 years after the creation of the measles vaccine, the disease was deemed eradicated in the United States — meaning that no new cases were emerging from within the country, and that cases identified within the U.S. were contracted abroad. According to the CDC, after almost two decades of limited measles infections attributed to a successful and effective public vaccination campaign “in 2019, the U.S. nearly lost its elimination status with almost 1,300 measles cases from a large outbreak in New York and cases in 30 additional states.”
“After a decrease in global measles incidence during the COVID-19 pandemic, measles activity globally and in the United States continues to rise,” the CDC continued.
The resurgence in measles outbreaks can be attributed to an increase in vaccine hesitancy, particularly by parents with young children. The CDC reports that “vaccination coverage among U.S. kindergartners has decreased from 95.2% during the 2019–2020 school year to 92.7% in the 2023–2024 school year, leaving approximately 280,000 kindergartners at risk during the 2023–2024 school year.”
While 16 measles outbreaks — which the CDC defines as three or more related cases — were reported last year, only four were reported in 2023. The current outbreak in Texas has nearly surpassed the 50 percent threshold for all reported measles infections in 2024, and it’s only February.
It is, in fact, “unusual” to have scores of individuals infected with the measles in the United States, and even more so for anyone to die of an outbreak. But it’s not the first time Kennedy has downplayed the deadly virus, especially when it comes to serving his anti-vaccine views.
In 2021, Kennedy wrote in the foreword to a book produced by his anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense that “readers-American and global consumers of measles vaccines — will learn that they have been misled by the pharmaceutical industry and their captured government agency allies into believing that measles is a deadly disease and that measles vaccines are necessary, safe, and effective.”
“True investigative journalists should have long ago exposed the facts that CHD is making manifest: Measles outbreaks have been fabricated to create fear that in turn forces government officials to ‘do something.’ They then inflict unnecessary and risky vaccines on millions of children,” he added.
In 2019, Children’s Health Defense — then under Kennedy’s stewardship — fomented anti-measles vaccine sentiment in Samoa ahead of an outbreak that killed 83 people. Public panic over the safety of the vaccine began after two children died due to receiving vaccinations improperly prepared by a nurse.
As the Samoan public became wary of the vaccine, Kennedy took a trip to Samoa, where he met with the prime minister to discuss vaccinations, met with local anti-vaccine activists, and wrote a letter suggesting the outbreak could have been caused by defective vaccines.
One child is already dead in the United States, and with a Health Secretary who believes that the risk of measles is a lie fabricated by the deep state at the helm of the government’s response, things could get significantly worse before they get better.
