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Tragic Anti-vaccine group founded by RFK Jr. weaponizes childs measles death The interview downplayed the disease, maligned vaccines, touted unproven treatments Beth Mole Mar 20, 2025 2:26 pm | 0 Credit: South_agency Credit: South_agency Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreThe parents of an unvaccinated 6-year-old girl who died of measles in Texas last month sat down for an interview with Children's Health Defense (CHD), the rabid anti-vaccine organization founded and run until recently by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now US health secretary under the Trump administration.The child's vaccine-preventable death marked the first measles fatality in the US in a decade. It's a tragedy that stands as a dark reminder of the dangers of the diseaseone of the most infectious known to humankindand the importance of the lifesaving vaccinations. But, in the interview, CHD wielded the loss of the young child as a means to downplay the deadly disease, attack the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella vaccine, tout unproven treatments, and spread misinformation.Preventable deathThe video interview, which was posted Monday, begins with the grieving parents, who are Mennonites, recounting their daughter's decline amid sobs: She came down with measles, developed the telltale rash, and then her fever kept climbing, and her breathing worsened. They took her to the emergency room and she was admitted to the hospital. Doctors found she had developed pneumonia, a known complication of measles that strikes about 1 in 20 children infected and is the most common cause of measles deaths in young children. Her condition deteriorated, she was moved to the intensive care unit, intubated, but continued to decline and died.From there, the interview took a turn. The mother said that after the death, her other four children developed the disease. It "must have been petrifying," CHD's director of programming, Polly Tommey, who was leading the interview, said. "Yeah, it was. It was hard," the mother replied. But then, the family had the children treated by an alternative practitioner, Ben Edwards, who has grown popular in their West Texas community amid the ongoing measles outbreak. Edwards administers unproven treatments, including cod liver oil and the steroid budesonide, which is used to treat asthma and Crohn's disease.Cod liver oil contains high levels of vitamin A, which is sometimes administered to measles patients under a physician's supervision. But the supplement is mostly a supportive treatment in children with vitamin deficiencies, and taking too much can cause toxicity. Nevertheless, Kennedy has touted the vitamin and falsely claimed that good nutrition protects against the virus, much to the dismay of pediatricians."They had a really good, quick recovery," the mother said of her other four children, attributing their recovery to the unproven treatments.Tragic misinformationMost children do recover from measles, regardless of whether they're given cod liver oil. The fatality rate of measles is nearly 1 to 3 in 1,000 children, who die with respiratory (e.g. pneumonia) or neurological complications from the virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Tommey noted that the sibling who died didn't get the alternative treatments, leading the audience to believe that this could have contributed to her death. She also questioned what was written on the death certificate, noting that the girl's pneumonia was from a secondary bacterial infection, not the virus directly, a clear effort to falsely suggest measles was not the cause of death and downplay the dangers of the disease. The parents said they hadn't received the death certificate yet.Tommey then turned to the MMR vaccine, asking if the mother still felt that it was a dangerous vaccine after her daughter's death from the disease, prefacing the question by claiming to have seen a lot of "injury" from the vaccine. "Do you still feel the same way about the MMR vaccine versus measles?" she asked."Yes, absolutely; we would absolutely not take the MMR. The measles wasn't that bad and they got over it pretty quickly," the mother replied, speaking again of her four living children."So," Tommey continued, "when you see the fearmongering in the press, which is what we want to stop, that is why we want to get the truth out, what do you say to the parents who are rushing out, panicking, to get the MMR for their 6-month-old baby because they think that that child is going to die of measles because of what happened to your daughter?"Through a translator, who spoke low German, the parents' primary language, her response was that she would still say "don't do the shots. There [are] doctors that can help with measles. [Measles is] not as bad as they're making it out to be."Dangerous falsehoodsThe father then chimed in to falsely claim that measles is "good for the body," and that people who survive the illness are left with stronger immune systems that can fight off cancers later in life. This is a dangerous falsehood that Kennedy has also recently repeated.Recovering from the measles does not protect against cancer or any other disease besides measles. In fact, a measles infection has the ability to wipe out immune responses built up against other infectionsa phenomenon called immune amnesia, driven by the destruction of memory T- and B-cells. This leaves people who recover from the measles virus more vulnerable to all other germs.This is not the only severe risk of measles. In addition to neurological and respiratory complications from measles infections, which can demonstrably turn deadly, measles can cause subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), a fatal neurological condition that can flare seven to 10 years after a measles infection.CHD and Kennedy have relentlessly spread dangerous misinformation about the safe, life-saving MMR vaccine, including that it causes autism (it does not) and even deaths (it does not). After decades of research and reviews, scientists have found no link between autism and MMR vaccines, or any other vaccine. Infectious disease experts also counter that no healthy (immunocompetent) person has ever died of an MMR vaccine. The vaccine could be life-threatening in people with compromised immune systems and, for that reason, is not given to those medically vulnerable people.Prior to the development of measles vaccines, the virus infected 3 to 4 million people each year, sending an estimated 48,000 to the hospital. About 1,000 developed brain swelling and 400 to 500 died.Two doses of MMR vaccine are 97 percent effective against measles, and the protection is considered life-long.The young girl's death occurred amid a large, ongoing outbreak in undervaccinated communities in West Texas that has spread to New Mexico and Oklahoma. Currently, the outbreak has reached over 300 cases. Thirty-eight people have been hospitalized, and one other person, an unvaccinated adult in New Mexico, has also died.Beth MoleSenior Health ReporterBeth MoleSenior Health Reporter Beth is Ars Technicas Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes. 0 Comments
