With the subhead “MMR vaccine is crucial to avoiding potentially deadly disease,” the notorious anti-vaxxer wrote, “Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.”
Texas Well being and Human Providers first reported the outbreak in mid-January. The illness quickly unfold, reaching practically 150 confirmed circumstances. The bulk (if not virtually all) of these circumstances are amongst kids who haven’t acquired the MMR vaccine. Texas officers say the outbreak is the worst in virtually three a long time.
Final week, throughout Donald Trump’s weird Cupboard assembly, Kennedy glibly dismissed a measles-related dying of a school-aged baby as “not unusual.” It was really the primary measles fatality recorded within the U.S. in over a decade.
Kennedy has spent a lot of his profession selling anti-vaccine misinformation, notably amplifying debunked dangerous science connecting the MMR vaccine to autism charges in kids. Kennedy, together with others within the anti-vaxx motion have contributed to declining vaccination charges, leading to outbreaks just like the one in Texas.
The Texas outbreak, which started in Gaines County and has now unfold to eight extra counties, had alarmingly low vaccination charges amongst its circumstances of school-aged kids. This isn’t simply by probability; It has been fomented by Mr. Measles and his anti-science allies for many years.
On the similar time, the Youngsters’s Well being Protection, the group Kennedy based and beforehand chaired, continues to advertise false details about the Texas outbreak. On Feb. 20, its official social media account blamed the outbreak on the MMR vaccine itself. Their claims have the identical quantity of proof they’ve all the time had—zero.
Kennedy can write as many toothless op-eds as he likes, however as circumstances pile up Kennedy’s first order of enterprise on the HHS was to intestine the company tasked with educating the general public and stopping outbreaks like this one. Kennedy even abruptly canceled the FDA’s deliberate assembly for subsequent flu season and paused multimillion-dollar efforts to develop a brand new COVID-19 vaccine to take care of new strains.
With the Trump administration’s historical past of mismanaging public well being, and Elon Musk’s give attention to destroying our authorities companies, the longer term is simply going to get extra harmful for People.
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