Last week, an 8-year-old girl became the second child and the third person to die of measles in the current outbreak. But it was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, who dominated the news cycle.

“The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine,” Kennedy wrote on X on Sunday afternoon. It was hailed as his strongest endorsement of measles vaccination yet. But in his next post, a few hours later, Kennedy praised two controversial doctors’ unproven treatments for measles, making no mention of vaccines. On Thursday, he followed that up by saying on Fox News that “we need to do better at treating kids who have this disease, and not just saying the only answer is vaccination.”

This type of framing makes it sound like families have two equal options for dealing with measles. “It provides a false equivalency—it says you can either get vaccinated or you can be treated with these unproven interventions,” Peter Hotez, dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told me. Instead, “his rhetoric should be on one thing and one thing only; it should be all hands on deck, in terms of launching a catch-up vaccination campaign and explaining to parents the vital importance of getting vaccinated,” Hotez said. “That’s the only way you can prevent this epidemic from accelerating, and it’s the only way you can hope to contain it. And there’s no other intervention.”

Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization helmed by Kennedy until recently, has made claims even wilder than the health secretary’s—even seeming to argue that it’s the hospital killing kids, not measles. CHD claimed in March that the first child died as a result of “medical error” because doctors gave her certain antibiotics instead of their preferred antibiotics for a secondary bacterial infection that developed during her measles illness. (Measles itself is a viral illness. Antibiotics will not treat it, though antibiotics can treat bacterial infections that develop as a result of the primary illness.) In reality, that type of secondary infection isn’t fatal, and it’s not what killed the little girl. Measles did. Even so, other anti-science quacks are echoing the same argument, with one doctor who rose to prominence by spreading Covid-19 misinformation asserting the second girl died from being “improperly medically managed.”

This isn’t anti-vaxxers squabbling at the fringes;........

© New Republic