Last week, a top Health and Human Services official resigned abruptly. Tom Corry, the assistant secretary of public affairs at HHS resigned after two weeks on the job. Reportedly, Corry’s resignation was because he was deeply uncomfortable with HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy’s “muted response” to the measles outbreak in Texas. More than 140 people in Texas have been diagnosed with measles, a disease which had been largely eradicated in the US due to MMR vaccine mandates for schoolkids. Following Corry’s resignation, Kennedy actually made a public statement in support of the MMR vaccine… but still left wiggle room for anti-vaxxers to allow their children to die from measles.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke of the benefits of the MMR vaccine on Sunday in response to a growing measles outbreak in Texas. Kennedy has a long record of sowing skepticism about vaccines and last week appeared to downplay the situation in Texas when he described such outbreaks as “not unusual.” He has previously repeated debunked claims about vaccines and provided elusive answers to senators on his stance on vaccinations ahead of being confirmed.
Kennedy wrote an op-ed for Fox News Digital on Sunday with the headline “Measles outbreak is call to action for all of us” and the subheading “MMR vaccine is crucial to avoiding potentially deadly disease.”
Kennedy wrote that before the introduction of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in the 1960s, “virtually every child in the United States contracted measles.” He noted that from 1953 to 1962, “on average there were 530,217 confirmed cases and 440 deaths,” with a fatality rate of 1 in 1,205 cases.
“Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons,” Kennedy wrote. Yes, but: Kennedy emphasized that the decision to vaccinate is “a personal one.”
At least 146 measles cases have been identified in the South Plains and Panhandle since January, according to the latest available information from the Texas Department of State Health Services. A school-aged child in Lubbock who was not vaccinated against measles died after contracting the highly contagious virus, according to the department. The outbreak comes as vaccination rates fall and trust in public health institutions declines.
“The outbreak comes as vaccination rates fall and trust in public health institutions declines.” The outbreak also comes as Kennedy canceled an FDA and CDC meeting about this year’s flu shots. The outbreak also comes as Kennedy has spent decades sounding like a rusty muffler as he spread deadly conspiracies about vaccines and public health. Apparently, Kennedy is talking about the efficacy of Vitamin A in treating measles. You know what’s better? Vaccinating your g–damn children.
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- Robert F Kennedy, Jr testifies before the United States Senate Committee on Finance concerning his nomination to be US Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on Wednesday, January 29, 2025. Copyright: xRonxSachsx/,Image: 958656296, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: imago is entitled to issue a simple usage license at the time of provision. Personality and trademark rights as well as copyright laws regarding art-works shown must be observed. Commercial use at your own risk., Model Release: no, Credit line: IMAGO/Ron Sachs / CNP /MediaPunch/Avalon/Avalon
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- Robert F Kennedy, Jr, right, and his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, left, arrive prior to Kennedy giving testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Finance concerning his nomination to be US Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on Wednesday, January 29, 2025. Copyright: xRonxSachsx/,Image: 958656389, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: imago is entitled to issue a simple usage license at the time of provision. Personality and trademark rights as well as copyright laws regarding art-works shown must be observed. Commercial use at your own risk., Model Release: no, Credit line: IMAGO/Ron Sachs / CNP /MediaPunch/Avalon/Avalon
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- Washington, DC – United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner, top right, prays with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, US President Donald Trump, and US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington. Elon Musk’s demand that more than two million federal employees defend their work is facing pushback from other powerful figures in the Trump administration, in a sign that the billionaire’s brash approach to overhauling the government is creating division. Pictured: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. BACKGRID USA 26 FEBRUARY 2025 BYLINE MUST READ: MediaPunch / BACKGRID USA: +1 310 798 9111 / usasales@backgrid.com UK: +44 208 344 2007 / uksales@backgrid.com *UK Clients – Pictures Containing Children Please Pixelate Face Prior To Publication*
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- Washington, DC – United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner, top right, prays with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, US President Donald Trump, and US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington. Elon Musk’s demand that more than two million federal employees defend their work is facing pushback from other powerful figures in the Trump administration, in a sign that the billionaire’s brash approach to overhauling the government is creating division. Pictured: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. BACKGRID USA 26 FEBRUARY 2025 BYLINE MUST READ: MediaPunch / BACKGRID USA: +1 310 798 9111 / usasales@backgrid.com UK: +44 208 344 2007 / uksales@backgrid.com *UK Clients – Pictures Containing Children Please Pixelate Face Prior To Publication*
Sounds like someone took him behind the woodshed. Hopefully he will reschedule the meeting to discuss 2026 flu strains.
Read people were doing measles parties. I’ve heard of chicken pox parties but ye gods. Even before the vaccinations were available people knew that the side effects of measles could be life changing: deafness, blindness etc.
But, who is it in authority now that would take him behind the woodshed?
Hate to give her any credit but maybe Cheryl? Because there is literally no one in this administration (or GOP Congress) that is capable of acknowledging the crucial public health importance of vaccines.
I don’t think he was ordered to do this. I think he made the statement now because one child has already died and the outbreak continues to spread with relatively new cases reported in Orange County (a child that flew through LAX over a month ago, so there were a lot of people to contact) and two new cases on the east coast (one in Bergen County, NJ and one in Montgomery County, PA). The administration doesn’t yet have the ability the censor reporting to hide from the public. Additionally, the cases are getting more reporting in the media because it’s yet another situation in which the cuts being made to agencies are being highlighted as being a direct threat to the general public.
Kennedy’s statement sends a mixed message. My guess is his goal was to get the media and public off his back for now and then make sure we still have low vaccination rates so that he can point to outbreaks & spread due to the lack of herd effect as “proof” that vaccinations really don’t prevent the spread/deaths – until they can really lock down media and public access to information via censorship on top of making sure any staff left in public health officials are MAGA loyalists that will continue MAGA disinformation campaigns
Having an anti-vaxxer as HHS Secretary is just crazy. He should be on all the morning shows advocating for the vaccination of all children.
Too late and not nearly enough. IMO, he’s one of the people to blame for any children dying of measles. My selfish pos sister is visiting Texas now and apparently she doesn’t share what vaccinations her kids get bc it’s a personal choice and private. But says to trust that she’s knows what’s best for her precious babies. Her patronizing words not mine. So yeah, I’m thinking they’re not? I love those kids so so much and don’t want them getting sick. I don’t want them getting sick and spreading the freaking measles to other peoples’ precious babies bc all babies are precious, not just our personal own, JFC. We have to take care of each other but why can’t these selfish people get that? Omg, I’m so angry. All the time.
I am so sorry that you are worried about your nephews/nieces. Am I right to guess that you and your sister are vaccinated?
That’s what burns me up about anti vaxx parents of young children – they are likely vaccinated and safe against the diseases that they won’t protect their own children against.
Oh yeah we are. So she’s protected while her kids are likely not. And my parents are appropriately horrified. But the more we’ve gently asked questions and gently pushed, the more she digs in her heels. Until it escalated to saying that we strait up think it’s wrong for all the reasons it wrong. To which it’s just a reply of well we’re all allowed to have differences of opinions and personal choice. But what about when it affects others??? And she doesn’t seem to care. It’s maddening. Watching the people around us turn into cold uncaring assholes who don’t care about anyone else. The damage is done. I blame her. And I blame FB and Instagram misinformation from the past 5 years or so. And Trump and maga and rfk jr. No kids should be getting the measles and suffering from long-term effects. And yet people like my sister are making it so. We’ve reached the grotesque pendulum swing of Emerson and Throureau’s founding ideas.
I truly do not understand it either. I have a college friend who got conned by a nut job on Facebook who claims to cure otherwise untreatable cancer by telling her “clients” to eat healthy food (think: Belle Gibson – this nutty woman also published a cookbook with her anti vax and anti doctor theories laced throughout). Anyway, my friend now has disordered eating, looks emaciated, has shriveled skin, and she’s inflicting it on her pre-teen kids too. It’s awful to watch and she won’t listen to reason. She gets upset if someone in our college group chat has said they’ve gotten medical help for a health issue and starts lighting up the chat with “health recipes” to cure their illness instead.
@Sue, Jesus, the story about your friend is awful. I recently heard about a father in my community (his youngest is the age of some friends oldest kids, so a few years older than my kids) who pared away in ‘22. I remembered hearing about his cancer and going through it during Covid. I recently found out, he was diagnosed with a very treatable stage 2 lung cancer in like 2018 (90%survival rate), and listened to some quack in Oklahoma? And treated himself with ivermectin and whatever supplements the guy sold for a few years until during Covid, the cancer become so advanced that he finally switched to conventional treatment, too late. I remain dumbfounded. People really would rather die than admit their “research” sources are cons.
I don’t understand why this isn’t seen as a form of child abuse or at the very least, child neglect. If your child has a medical reason that’s one thing but all this nonsense about religious exemptions or grown-ass adults projecting their regressive political ideology on their kids….smdh so very immoral and TBH cruel.
But I guess this stance is consistent from the transphobic Right, who think kids should have no say in their medical decisions and everything should be determined by their parents’ politics.
I saw a social media screen grab a few days ago about people’s ids shamelessly hatching into the broad daylight coincided with people getting lifted trucks and those eye searing headlights. That the kind of selfishness that allowed people to get blinding bright lights and not consider how they affect anyone else really coincided with the kind of thinking that allowed people to not vaccinate their children. Sickening.
His followers are freaking out because he’s done a total 180 and is now warning people about outbreaks of tuberculosis, measles, bird flu, and even a chickenpox thing on Penn State’s campus. He’s no medical expert, but Putin’s puppet basically gave him carte blanche with our HEALTH & LIVES 😡😡😡
We Are! having an outbreak of chicken pox (which totally sucks). FYI if you are over 50, be sure to get your shingles shot! The shingles virus is basically the chicken pox virus that’s been dormant in your body since you had them as a child. I’ve had friends who’ve had shingles and say it is unbelievably painful! And I echo everyone’s angry at the anti-vaxers and the way they’ve been tearing down our amazing public health system. People like my grandma were so grateful for vaccines and all of the amazing advances science made in the 20th century. Those people railing against science have absolutely no historical understand of how awful these diseases were, not just painful, but that they had long-term effects up to and including death!
Can you imagine not vaccinating your children?? What idiots.
Someone I went to school with is an absolutely insane anti-vax nutjob who calls herself a holistic practitioner
( zero education in the subject) and gives advice like “ if your child has an ear infection, have them sleep with an onion against their ear” and “if your child has a bronchial infection, put potatoes in their socks at night and give them oregano oil every 4 hours”. I’m not exaggerating, that is literally what she’s suggested. Her son was not vaccinated as a child, but when he turned 18 he went and immediately started to get all of the vaccines he was denied growing up. She cried on social media that he was poisoning himself and how she couldn’t be around him because he’d be shedding vaccines, blah, blah, blah. She herself is vaccinated. She is so dangerous and looks at RFK jr as some kind of hero. We are Canadian so it’s even more pathetic. The fact that eradicated diseases are making a comeback in 2025 is terrifying. It’s child abuse to not vaccinate your children in this day and age.
To be fair the onion /earache cure is, weirdly, a real thing. First hand experience of this. Honest. Nevertheless, anti-vaxxers are actual dangerous idiots.
NOT AT ALL. I will never understand it.
No. He’s still hemming and hawing about “personal choice” rather than medical exemptions. The personal choices are why there’s an outbreak. Say it with your whole chest, RFK. VACCINATE YOUR KIDS.
If people like him didn’t spread dangerous lies, there wouldn’t BE an outbreak. Telling people to vaccinate as kids are dying, from something we’ve been able to prevent for decades, after raging against vaccines for so long, it’s just…
I just can’t with this fucking idiot. You can die from flu and covid but ok measles we should vaccinate for? We should vaccinate for whatever we can!!!
I’m in Dfw area of Texas, the big outbreak is where my aunt and uncle lived for a few years, Hobbs NM is the closest big grocery store, which is why it’s spread to there. It’s going to be a miracle if this doesn’t turn into another epidemic among kids.
Also, someone looked up the lowest vaccinated schools in the DFW area, and they’re all private Christian schools. One school has a vaccination rate of 15%. I’ve been told that school is connected to a church that’s basically a cult, but Christ on a cracker. The rest are mostly in the 30-40s range (of the top least vaccinated). My kids public school is 96%, so I trust our herd. I also double checked my kids vaccine status in November.
This feels like Covid again, where lunatics are fine with dying over a jab. Our current pediatrician posted on fb that they’re now offering MMR to babies under a year, so they can have some protection (the reported case in Austin is an infant). Two posts below that was our former pediatrician posting a baby onesie available for sale that said something like, “My parents decide about my body!” Found out during Covid our pediatrician was anti vax and anti mask when I took my daughter in, 6 months in, and we were the only ppl wearing masks in the waiting room. Shit is bananas.
“This feels like Covid again, where lunatics are fine with dying over a jab.”
It’s worse than that because the revisionist history coming out of the Right was that COVID was basically just a cold. Like, most of them don’t even acknowledge the fact that millions of people died. I even had a firefighter tell me recently that he was diverted from “life-saving calls” during COVID to care for people with “cold symptoms”. As the wife of a paramedic, COVID was one of the darkest times in our household. So much uncertainty and fear…lots of scary cases, treating very sick people. And believe me my husband was VERY thankful for both PPE and later, the vaccine.
I’m seeing a lot of this revision about Covid on social media (and I wonder how much of it started with Russian bots). Basically it is in posts about federal workers losing their jobs (another infuriating topic) where many “commenters” are arguing, well, you didn’t feel sorry for people who lost their jobs when they refused to get a covid shot. The fact that no one seems to remember that millions of people died before we had the vaccine is infuriating.
YES! That same firefighter started with that shit: “well you didn’t feel bad for first responders who lost their jobs”. No you’re right I don’t feel even slightly bad for them. This is a public health issue–you are literally going into peoples’ homes and breathing in their fucking faces while you treat them and you can’t be bothered to get a simple shot? Vaccines should absolutely be a requirement for healthcare workers–enough of this framing of “my body, my choice”–people have a goddamn right to feel that someone who is touching/treating them aren’t gonna infect them FFS.
I was just going to post that many older people were never vaccinated against these diseases and are at serious risk if they come in contact.
My dad, (RIP, daddy), was a firefighter who contracted mumps from sick kids he rescued from a burning building. He was out of work for weeks and there was much concern about possible hearing loss. Parents were done having kids so it wasn’t a concern for them but mumps can also cause male infertility
I saw an article yesterday that it’s nearly impossible to get through to these anti-vaxxers once they’ve joined the cult. It will take years to erase the damage from this movement if we ever do. And even now, Kennedy is prevaricating. This cannot be a matter of “individual choice” since everyone, or, nearly everyone, must be innoculated in order to develop herd immunity.
The thing that is so troubling about stuff like this… against vaccinations but for vitamin a or e or whatever… everything is a chemical. Just because something is ‘natural’ meaning not man-made doesn’t mean it is harmless. You can overdo everything. Why keep searching for ridiculous alternatives when a vaccine is safe and effective
so – it’s cool to be the weirdo Kennedy with all these outrageous beliefs – because my sense is he comes from the school of “all attention is good” and the media follows his drama because – he’s the crazy Kennedy. But now – he’s got this job. And accountability. And the crazy may make life a lot harder versus easier for him. Leaning into science – means smooth sailing and lots of time to do – whatever weird shit he does. Killing bears – I dunno. Anyway – I hope he will consider the time and effort required to be crazy and decide the trade-off isn’t worth it anymore.
We, in Toronto Canada just got a new mandate to start pre-screening for the measles in the healthcare and dental industries.. and We Canadians think its coming from America.. aka Texas.. haha No, just joking. We’ve actually been aware of this since last September but now its getting super serious. I work in healthcare, I’m over 40 years old and vaccinated but I have never had to measles and don’t want to get it as an adult either!
Too little, too late, RFK Jr. His wing nut conspiracy theories, and that anti-vax organization he was until recently a part of, are to blame for the reappearance of measles in the US. Period. He has that child’s death on his hands.
He already has 80+ deaths from measles on his hands in the Samoas. He encouraged the folks there not to vaccinate and I think 83 kids and elderly folks died. I wish they’d arrested him then for spreading misinformation.