RFK Jr. Failed America on Measles
In 2024, during his failed presidential run, Kennedy—a longtime anti-vaccine activist—told an interviewer that he wouldn’t give his children the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine if they were born today.
Key points
- In April, he told a Senate committee that “the measles epidemic began before I came into office.” That’s true: Measles had already begun to spread in West Texas by January 2025, before Kennedy became health secretary.
- (In an emailed statement earlier this week, an HHS spokesperson cited that assistance and $100 million the CDC recently sent to states as evidence of the department’s “aggressive” response to measles.) But under Kennedy, the CDC’s response has also at times appeared constrained.
- (Vitamin A can help treat measles in children who have a severe deficiency but has not been shown to be effective for most Americans.) Perhaps most dramatically, Kennedy and his HHS have fought with states over the precise toll that measles has taken.
This is already America’s worst year for measles since 1991, which marked the end of a three-year epidemic in which 123 people died.
Additional details
- As the number of deaths reported by states has continued to rise, the CDC has so far declined to attribute some of them to measles; its dashboard currently lists only six fatalities.
- And routine childhood-vaccination rates, including the measles immunization, have declined since the coronavirus pandemic, which disrupted doctor appointments around the country.
- In August, after two infants died in Pennsylvania, Kennedy and Governor Josh Shapiro got into a public dispute over whether measles contributed to those children’s deaths.
- Meanwhile, Kennedy and the Department of Health and Human Services have failed to send a clear message to Americans about the importance of curbing the virus’s spread.
- The Washington Post reported that an alert that CDC scientists wanted to send regarding the risks of measles during pregnancy was not approved for unclear reasons.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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