‘Too little, too late’ doesn’t even come close.
It would be easy to miss amid the second Trump administration’s assault on decency, democracy and the international trade order, but something slightly encouraging happened early this morning our time.
The US’s most prominent anti-vaccine advocate and also its health secretary RFK Jr dropped by X to say the MMR vaccine was the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles – his most direct endorsement of any vaccine since his campaign for the job began.
To be sure, he buried it at the bottom of the third par of a 250-word tweet, which is primarily about his visiting the family of the third person, and the second child, to die in the Texas measles outbreak:
“I am also here to support Texas health officials and to learn how our HHS agencies can better partner with them to control the measles outbreak, which as of today, there are 642 confirmed cases of measles across 22 states, 499 of those in Texas,” he writes.
“In early March, I deployed a CDC team to bolster local and state capacity for response across multiple Texas regions, supply pharmacies and Texas run clinics with needed MMR vaccines and other medicines and medical supplies … The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.”
This feeble capitulation to reality would not be cause for celebration in normal times.
It seems it took the completely unnecessary deaths of two little girls – Daisy Hildebrand, 8, and Kayley Fehr, 6, both unvaccinated – from a disease that was officially eliminated from the US 25 years ago to change this man’s worm-chewed mind about endorsing the single most effective public health tool against infectious disease.
Up to this point Kennedy has insisted the MMR vaccine causes illness and death and that its efficacy wanes, and resisted the calls of public health officials to recommend it.
Even after Fehr’s death (the first in a US child from measles in a decade), Kennedy was calling the outbreak nothing unusual, saying it happened every year. He changed his tune and called it “serious” only about a month ago.
He has blamed poor diet for susceptibility to the illness and spruiked vitamin A as a remedy, which is probably responsible for the 40% increase in vitamin A exposures reported to US poison centres since January. Even the trade body for vitamin supplements is worried.
This follows decades of activism including as founder of the explicitly anti-vax Children’s Health Defense organisation.
Any crack in this monumental stubbornness is to be welcomed, but it shouldn’t have come at such a grievous cost.
Nor is it a good week to bet on an imminent end to US health carnage when the federal committee overseeing ethics in medical research, the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections, has just been sent to the knackery, along with dozens of scientists who tracked drug-resistant STIs.
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