‘He needs to do much more’: RFK Jr.’s measles response under scrutiny
““He could be misinterpreted that vitamin A will save your suffocating suffering child,” Brett Giroir, a first-term Trump health official now advising Kennedy on infectious disease policy, wrote in a post on X. “It will not.”
In Texas, some local officials have grown concerned that Kennedy’s messaging risks diluting their own communication efforts. They warn that his equivocations could undermine their only hope of ending the outbreak: persuading people to get the measles vaccine.
“We don’t want to diminish the primary message,” Phil Huang, director of health and human services in Dallas County, Texas, said in an interview. “It’s the vaccines that are the most important.”
Katherine Wells, director of public health for the city of Lubbock, Texas, echoed that sentiment.
“We need to make sure that we’re all talking about the importance of vaccination, and although there’s some focus on treatment, preventing the disease in the first place is really what public health works on.”
Since President Donald Trump nominated him to run HHS late last year, Kennedy has labored to convince skeptics that he is not anti-vaccine, despite his past as an activist who repeatedly raised doubts about the safety and effectiveness of various immunizations.
As recently as 2021, Kennedy suggested without evidence that measles outbreaks may have been fabricated to “inflict unnecessary and risky vaccines on millions of children.” But now confronted with a high-risk, real-world opportunity to demonstrate whether his views have changed, the HHS secretary has instead appeared to seek a middle ground — calling the measles vaccine protective for individuals and broader communities, yet stopping well short of the full-throated endorsement public health experts say is necessary from the nation’s top health official.
“What he should be saying is that these kinds of outbreaks are fully preventable and unacceptable, and that as secretary he will do everything in his power to ensure the public that it never happens again,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. “It’s the first major public health crisis that he’s had to face, and he hasn’t reassured doubters about his ability to get on top of it.””
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“Most importantly, health experts said, Kennedy could simply hit the bar already set by health officials in Texas: Declaring unequivocally that vaccination is the central way to contain the outbreak.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/05/rfk-measles-scrutiny-00214952