RFK Jr. and the Texas Measles Outbreak: Round 2

In an op-ed for Fox News, RFK Jr. tried to recover from a disastrous first attempt to confront a growing measles epidemic in West Texas.

On February 26, 2025, an unvaccinated school-aged child in West Texas died from measles. This marked the first child death in the US from the disease since 2003. The death was part of a larger outbreak that involved 146 children, 20 of whom were hospitalized. At a White House meeting on February 27, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that measles outbreaks occur every year. In other words, no big deal. His failure to acknowledge the tragedy of a preventable death and the importance of vaccination angered public health officials.

A few days later, in an opinion piece on Fox News, he tried again. This time, RFK Jr. said that he “was deeply concerned about the recent measles outbreak,” and that he had “spoken to the bereaved parents of the deceased child to offer consolation.” He said that “measles was highly contagious, especially to those who were unvaccinated,” and that “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.” For a man who has consistently claimed that no vaccine is beneficial and that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism, this couldn’t have been easy. Anti-vaccine activists were outraged. His message, however, was not an an unflinching endorsement of either vaccines or public health.

For example, RFK Jr. said that “we must make vaccines accessible for all those who want them,” and that “the decision to vaccinate is a personal one.” These statements stood in direct contrast to his plea for community immunity, recognizing that people who can’t be vaccinated depend on those around them for protection. Now he was saying that it is your right to catch and transmit a potentially fatal infection during an epidemic that had already killed one child.

He said, “good nutrition remains a best defense against infectious diseases.” Unfortunately, good nutrition does not provide specific immunity. Only vaccination and natural infection do that. And vaccination is always the safer choice. RFK Jr.’s insistence that good nutrition is the best way to prevent infections harkens back to his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, where he rejects the germ theory of infectious diseases, writing, “The ubiquity of pasteurization and vaccinations are only two of the many indicators of the dominating ascendancy of germ theory as the cornerstone of contemporary public health policy. A $1 trillion pharmaceutical industry pushing patented pills, powders, pricks, potions, and poisons and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology…[The best] approach to public health is to boost individual immune responses.”

He also said that “studies have found that vitamin A can dramatically reduce measles mortality,” and that he had updated the CDC’s website to include that recommendation. While vitamin A clearly reduces measles mortality in developing world countries, where malnutrition and vitamin A deficiency is more common, the benefit of vitamin A in the developed world is, at best, limited.

Finally, RFK Jr. said that “tens of thousands died from measles annually in 19^th Century America. By 1960—before the vaccine’s introduction—improvements in sanitation and nutrition had eliminated 98 percent of measles deaths.” However, the dramatic reduction in measles deaths in the 1940s, before the availability of a measles vaccine, was a direct result of the invention of antibiotics to treat bacterial infections that were a consequence of the immune suppressive effects of measles virus.

As outbreaks of potentially fatal preventable infections continue, will RFK Jr. continue to argue strongly for nutrition and weakly for vaccines? Time will tell.