\n<\/p>\n
This spring, months before the recent dramatic departures from the CDC, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. battled with the agency\u2019s scientists during the very first public-health crisis of his tenure as health secretary. As measles tore through a remote community in West Texas, Kennedy waffled on the vaccine and promoted alternative remedies, such as vitamin A. So the CDC pushed back. Demetre Daskalakis, who resigned last week as the CDC\u2019s director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told me that the agency deliberately rebutted Kennedy by publishing a fact sheet, noting that vitamin A had been found to be effective against measles in countries that, unlike the United States, have high rates of vitamin-A deficiency. \u201cWe had to put up that PDF to subtly counter it, because providers were like, What the hell is actually happening?<\/em>\u201d Daskalakis said.<\/p>\n Since then, it\u2019s become clear that Kennedy has prevailed. In June, he fired all the members of the CDC\u2019s vaccine-advisory committee and replaced them with a cast that includes contrarians, anti-vaccine activists, and conspiracy theorists. Last week, Kennedy pushed out the CDC\u2019s director after less than a month on the job, and three senior leaders, including the chief medical officer, resigned in protest. Today, reports emerged that Kennedy wishes to pull the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines from the U.S. market, and that he plans to install more fringe figures on the vaccine committee ahead of its meeting on September 18. (HHS and the White House have maintained that Kennedy is basing policy on sound science. HHS did not respond to my request for comment.)<\/p>\n Kennedy appears to be taking a victory lap. In an op-ed published yesterday in The Wall Street Journal<\/em>, the health secretary excoriated the CDC he took over as dysfunctional and politicized. Now, he argues, thanks to his leadership, the CDC is on the right track. As evidence, he cited its response to the measles outbreak, which claimed the lives of two unvaccinated girls who were members of the same Mennonite church. \u201cWhen measles flared this year in Texas, we brought vaccines, therapeutics and resources to the epicenter. The outbreak ended quickly, proving the CDC can act swiftly with precision when guided by science and freed from ideology,\u201d Kennedy wrote. \u201cThat response was neither \u2018pro-vax\u2019 nor \u2018antivax.\u2019 It wasn\u2019t distracted by \u2018equity outcomes\u2019 or politically correct language like \u2018pregnant people.\u2019 It was effective.\u201d<\/p>\n Much of that is misleading. Far from ending quickly, the outbreak in West Texas lasted from January to August and fed a measles surge that spread to 41 states\u2014the country\u2019s worst since 1992. The CDC documented 1,431 cases nationwide, though health officials say many of those who contracted measles were never tested and therefore weren\u2019t counted. More than 100 children and teenagers were hospitalized. As for the \u201cswift\u201d response, although the CDC did send researchers to the area in early March after the first death, a recent story published by KFF Health News<\/em> documents early confusion and silence from the federal government. On February 5, the public-health director in Lubbock, Texas, wrote in an email, \u201cMy staff feels like we are out here all alone.\u201d<\/p>\n Yesterday\u2019s op-ed isn\u2019t the first time Kennedy has downplayed the outbreak\u2019s severity. During a White House Cabinet meeting in February, Kennedy said that what was happening in West Texas was \u201cnot unusual,\u201d even though a 6-year-old girl, Kayley Fehr, had already died, the first such death in the United States in a decade. He also claimed that those who were hospitalized were there \u201cmainly for quarantine.\u201d In fact, a hospital official later said, no one had been quarantined; children were being hospitalized because they were seriously ill.<\/p>\n Kennedy also undermined the CDC\u2019s vaccination efforts by offering mixed messages about the measles vaccine and promoting unproven alternative treatments. After casting the decision to vaccinate as a \u201cpersonal one\u201d in March, he seemed to modify his stance, noting accurately that \u201cthe most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.\u201d But as I reported in April, when Kennedy went to Seminole for the funeral of a second girl, 8-year-old Daisy Hildebrand, he said at a gathering after her service \u201cYou don\u2019t know what\u2019s in the vaccine anymore,\u201d according to her father. (HHS would not confirm this at the time.) Kennedy also referred to two doctors in West Texas who he said favored unproven measles treatments, such as cod-liver oil and an inhaled steroid, as \u201cextraordinary healers.\u201d In his Wall Street Journal<\/em> op-ed, Kennedy wrote that the CDC sent \u201ctherapeutics\u201d\u2014evidently his term for treatments such as vitamin A, steroids, and antibiotics\u2014to Seminole to combat the virus. But as my colleague Nicholas Florko wrote back in March, none of those treatments was requested by health-care providers in Texas\u2014or delivered by the CDC. Yesterday, a spokesperson for the state\u2019s health department confirmed to me that the CDC sent only vaccines. In late March, Covenant Children\u2019s Hospital, in nearby Lubbock, reported treating a small number of unvaccinated children with measles who were also suffering from vitamin-A toxicity.<\/p>\n I visited Seminole during the outbreak and spoke with the families of the two children who\u2019d died, along with others in their close-knit Mennonite community. I saw how public-health officials struggled to persuade a community suspicious of the vaccine to line up for shots. Many residents of Seminole echoed Kennedy\u2019s anti-vaccine message, even as their children fell ill or awaited burial. Now fewer scientists in senior positions are left at the CDC to issue fact sheets, encourage visits to disease-stricken communities, and otherwise curb Kennedy\u2019s worst anti-vaccine impulses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This spring, months before the recent dramatic departures from the CDC, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. battled with the agency\u2019s scientists during the very first public-health crisis of his tenure as health secretary. As measles tore through a remote community in West Texas, Kennedy waffled on the vaccine and promoted alternative remedies, such as vitamin A.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18949,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[1671,2000,3009,789,3518],"class_list":{"0":"post-18948","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-atlantic","9":"tag-jr-s","10":"tag-lap","11":"tag-rfk","12":"tag-victory"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}