Vaccine hesitancy's #1 enabler backs measles shots

After a second child dies in the Texas measles outbreak, RFK Jr. visits the county where one in five kindergartners isn't vaccinated.

It would take an Arthur Miller to do full justice to the gothic plot twists in the two deaths from the widening measles outbreak in Texas. Both young girls belonged to a religious community that dresses in black and avoids seeking help from the health care system. Over half the children in some area schools go unvaccinated.

Meanwhile, the state’s rabidly rightwing governor remains silent, leaving it to the nation’s top health official, a vaccine skeptic, to visit the latest victim’s grieving family. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., playing the role of Rev. John Hale (who precided over the Salem witch trials), takes to social media (how many Texas Mennonites doomscroll X?) to declare “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.”

What next for the HHS chief? Falling to his knees to proclaim his faith in science?

I doubt it. RFK Jr. has yet to repudiate his frequent statements that vaccines should remain a personal choice and not a public health imperative. Immunology experts say community-wide protection against the highly infectious measles virus requires a 95% vaccination rate. Texas childhood vaccination rates fell last year to 94% among kindergartners, down from 97% in 2019. Rates are much lower rates in the West Texas counties where 471 out of 607 cases reported thus far have been located.

The cost of vaccine hesitancy

During Covid, vaccine hesitancy moved well beyond religious objectors, fed by widespread anger over mask mandates, economic shutdowns and disinformation spread by vaccine skeptics like RFK Jr. Measles cases have now been reported in 21 states.

Given that the measles vaccine is both safe and highly effective and vaccination rates remain relatively high, it’s unlikely we will return to the pre-1963 days when 400 to 500 children died each year from the disease. However, public experts are warning measles could become endemic again due to falling vaccination rates and the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization, which operates more than 700 laboratories in 164 countries whose job includes tracking and preventing measles.

U.S. aid for global health organizations has been cancelled by the Trump administration. Those programs are critical to preventing diseases spreading from the developing world to the U.S. Passengers carrying the measles virus have been reported recently at Newark International Airport and Hobby International Airport in Houston.

“People don’t understand that supporting global immunization not only is good for their countries, but for our country,” Walter Orenstein, a professor emeritus at Emory University and the former director of the National Immunization Program at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told the New York Times. Added Thomas Frieden, the former CDC director: “We have really opened the door for this virus to come back.”

The mass layoffs at CDC won’t help. Much of the communication staff has been eliminated as part of the new HHS chief’s move to centralize all communications through his office, which has yet to issue a press release about the measles outbreak or a call for every child to get vaccinated.

Instead, he authored that X-tweet yesterday, which received widespread media coverage. As of this morning, it has received 3.3 million views and 4,700 comments. But his mention of the vaccine wasn’t at the top, which featured pictures of him with the grieving families. His statement that the MMR vaccine as “the most effective way to prevent the spread” of measles was buried deep in the third paragraph.

And would those 3.3 million people see if they look at the top pinned comment? One by

Del Bigtree

, the producer of “Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe,” which promotes the theory that the MMR vaccine causes autism. The fake-news documentary was directed by Andrew Wakefield, whose paper making that claim was retracted by the Lancet for containing faked data.

Screenshot of top comment on @SecKennedy’s X feed post backing MMR vaccine.