Kennedy's Vaccine Hypocrisy Is Unsustainable
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might have preferred to spend his early months as secretary of Health and Human Services on issues for which he has broad support, such as his battle against ultraprocessed food. But the country's devastating eruption of measles has proved to be a make-or-break event for him, and his constant equivocation on this issue has been disastrous.
Any hopes that Mr. Kennedy's noxious views on vaccines would moderate with responsibility were always wishful thinking. It may be impossible to change his course, but that doesn't mean those in positions of leadership shouldn't try.
As health secretary, Mr. Kennedy has failed to help control the measles outbreak in and around Texas, which has ballooned to more than 500 cases and now includes the deaths of two children. This lamentable outcome is unsurprising, given that he is a longtime critic of the measles shot and in 2021 dismissed measles outbreaks as 'fabricated to create fear.' For these reasons, many doctors, including me, were opposed to his nomination as leader of our health care system.
Mr. Kennedy's best chance at stopping the deadly measles outbreak and preventing other ones is by improving vaccination rates. Yet doing so would alienate him from the anti-vaccine community. He recently attended the funeral of one of the children who died, an 8-year-old girl in Texas, and reportedly questioned the safety of vaccines to her family members. But in his public comments about the visit, he wrote that 'the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.' That tepid statement made headlines and drew praise from Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican and a physician who reluctantly provided a key vote for Mr. Kennedy's confirmation.
Mr. Kennedy's supporters, however, saw the public comment as a betrayal. 'What on earth is going on with Bobby Kennedy,' wrote Liz Wheeler, a conservative media personality, adding that the Make America Healthy Again community 'fought for Bobby Kennedy because he was unafraid to name the dangers of the MMR vaccine.'
Del Bigtree, one of Mr. Kennedy's collaborators in the anti-vaccine movement, struggled to explain his apparent turnaround. 'I have worked with Bobby for many years and I can confidently say that he has a heart that is incapable of compromise,' Mr. Bigtree wrote on X. 'I also recognize that he is at a poker table with the slyest serpents in the world and the stakes are nothing less than the lives of our children and the future of our species.'
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