The callous response of the federal health secretary to the thoroughly preventable death of a Texas child from measles shows how terrible it is that vaccine foe Bobby Kennedy Jr. was confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
Add in that the Food and Drug Administration appeared to side against safe and effective medicine by cancelling the meeting of the committee tasked with identifying the strains for next season’s influenza vaccines is just more evidence that the crazy anti-science mindset is taking hold. God help us.
The flu vaccine needs to be updated every year to ward off ever-evolving strains, which is what the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee does.
Without it, we might simply not have effective vaccines next flu season. The consequences of that are not hard to extrapolate. More people will get ill, more of them seriously and more people will die. We can already use this flu season as something like a lower-key test run given dropping rates of immunizations.
According to CDC data — which we fortunately still have, though who knows for how long in an administration that seems bent on removing access to public data — there have been 13,000 deaths so far this season, and about 50,000 people hospitalized with influenza just this week. If and when we intentionally hamstring our immunization efforts, it will be the biggest gift we could give to the influenza virus.
This is all happening because the person who’s supposed to be leading the charge against the spread of communicable disease is something of a turncoat, instead working to increase our vulnerability to these pathogens. Health and Human Services Secretary Bobby Kennedy Jr. — confirmed by GOP senators who should have known better, including Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor who claimed, improbably, that he believed assurances that RFK wouldn’t target vaccines — has been a long-time standard-bearer of the anti-vaccine movement.
RFK Jr. has already shown how far he’s willing to go with this anti-scientific zealotry. As we’ve consistently pointed out, his 2019 excursion to Samoa contributed to a measles outbreak that would go on to kill 83 people in that country. Now, we have a measles outbreak of our own, stemming from a population of children in Texas who seem to have believed the filth spread by people like RFK and his former group Children’s Health Defense, a revoltingly misnamed organization devoted to muddying the waters about vaccine safety.
That outbreak has, for the first time in a decade, claimed the life of an unvaccinated child, 25 years after the disease was declared officially eliminated in this country following a nationwide vaccination push and much-maligned but very effective vaccine mandates. The health secretary’s response to this worsening crisis? That it is “not unusual” for there to be measles outbreaks in the U.S. One imagines a fire chief standing in front of a spreading wildfire shrugging that it is not unusual for houses to burn while getting rid of the county’s fire trucks. Horrible as it is, we hope at least this outbreak can create public pressure, before it’s too late.
RFK won’t even recommend that parents give their kids the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) shot, which does not cause autism. That poor Texas child is likely not to be the only fatality.
