Here’s a new definition of chutzpah: attending the funeral of an unvaccinated child who has died of measles after you have spent years undermining trust in the vaccine that could have saved her life.
But there was Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sunday, paying his respects to the Texas family of 8-year-old Daisy Hildebrand, the second American child to die from measles, a disease that was declared eliminated 25 years ago.
I know that grief can muddle someone’s thinking, but I actually gasped when I read what Daisy’s father, Pete Hildebrand, told reporters about the measles vaccine one day after he buried his child.
“I know it’s not effective because some family members ended up getting the vaccine, and they got the measles way worse than some of my kids,” said Hildebrand, who has two other young children. “The vaccine was not effective.”
Thanks to years of vaccine skepticism and hostility sown by “wellness gurus” such as Kennedy, the country is experiencing a significant, entirely unnecessary, surge in measles cases. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a total of 712 confirmed measles cases have been reported by 25 states, including California and Texas, where Daisy Hildebrand lived. That’s almost three times as many as last year, and we are only 3½ months into 2025.
Who knows what prompted Kennedy to finally admit in a tepid social media post that the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella, is “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles.”
Did he regret that his years of anti-vaccine misinformation and lies had contributed to the resurgence of the disease, which has now claimed the lives of two children and is associated with the death of an adult as well? Doubtful.
Is he finally giving up on undercutting faith in vaccines? Not really: Public health experts bemoan him continuously arguing that the government should not mandate vaccination, that the decision should be simply a personal one. This despite the crucial fact that vaccination conveys herd immunity without requiring anyone in the herd to get sick.
According to the Atlantic, Kennedy raised doubts again about the MMR vaccine with Daisy Hildebrand’s father. “I actually asked him about it,” Hildebrand told the magazine. “He said, ‘You don’t know what’s in the vaccine anymore.’ ”
And Kennedy continues to peddle the possibility that vaccination is a causal link to autism, despite reams of scientific research proving otherwise.
“Undermining confidence in well-established vaccines that have met the high standards for quality, safety and effectiveness that have been in place for decades … is detrimental to public health, and a clear danger to our nation’s health, safety and security,” wrote Peter Marks, the head of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, in his resignation letter last month. Marks, who played a critical role in the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, which produced a COVID-19 vaccine in record time, said he could no longer tolerate Kennedy’s “unprecedented assault on scientific truth that has adversely impacted public health.”
In her new book, “Crisis Averted,” infectious disease epidemiologist Caitlin Rivers calls public health “medicine’s quieter cousin.”
The book is a riveting history of vaccines and of the public health cycles she describes as “panic and neglect” where disease outbreaks — such as the devastating adenovirus that plagued military boot camps until a vaccine was developed in 1971 — led to effective responses that were too soon abandoned once the crisis had passed. (After the government refused to pay $5 million to upgrade the aged Wyeth Pharmaceuticals plant that made the vaccine, supplies gave out and adenovirus returned to boot camps, killing eight soldiers before the vaccine could be reintroduced in 2011 at a cost of $100 million. “Infectious diseases do not share humanity’s propensity for growing weary,” Rivers writes.)
In positive scenarios, disease outbreaks are quickly noticed by epidemiologists working across borders and time zones, identified and mitigated. In the best of cases, illness never even gets a foothold in the population. “If we do our jobs right,” Rivers writes, “nothing happens.”
Kennedy, meanwhile, hypocritically poses as an avatar of good health while taking testosterone supplements and appearing to surreptitiously slip a nicotine pouch into his mouth while testifying at one of his confirmation hearings. And he rails against the food industry’s use of artificial coloring?
The agency he oversees is now actively working against the interests of public health. In fact, there is a literally sickening disconnect between what he says about improving the health of Americans and what his version of Health and Human Services is actually doing.
Science journalist Deborah Blum wrote last week in the New York Times that while Kennedy has touted better regulation of food additives, “He’s quietly undermining the ability to do that work.” The workforce cuts he has overseen have, she wrote, “decimated the staff of a laboratory dedicated to testing for bacteria and toxic substances in food, such as heavy metal contamination.”
A less-regulated food system could lead to disaster — listeria, salmonella and other forms of food contamination that won’t be detected in time to save lives because there is no one to do the detecting. “Many experts,” writes Blum, “now believe food poisoning outbreaks will spread farther and last longer.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is under Kennedy’s control, has lost at least 20% of its workforce through the current round of layoffs and buyouts, the Associated Press reports. Entire divisions have been eliminated, including those focused on dental health, occupational safety and environmental health. The workers responsible for tracking disease outbreaks on cruise ships also have been let go.
Also erased, by Elon Musk’s ironically named Department of Government Efficiency: the CDC’s Freedom of Information Act team, staffers who watch for dangerous baby products, its Division of Violence Prevention and labs that monitor antibiotic resistance. Kennedy has said that some CDC workers were erroneously laid off by DOGE cuts and will be reinstated. “And that was always the plan,” he added. How efficient.
Listen, Kennedy is a hypocrite of the highest order, demanding data and denying it at the same time. And his motto — Make America Healthy Again — is nothing but a sick joke played on the American people.
Bluesky: @rabcarian.bsky.social Threads: @rabcarian
