Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is trying to shed his public image as an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist now that he heads up the Department of Health and Human Services. But in private, he continues to make the same conspiratorial claims he always has, The Atlantic reported on Thursday — and he has even proselytized them to the families of children who died of measles.
One of Kennedy's first major challenges as health secretary was to manage an outbreak of measles in Texas that has sickened hundreds, killing three. Measles, one of the most infectious viruses known to humans, was essentially wiped out as an endemic disease thanks to the MMR vaccine, which Kennedy has baselessly called dangerous.
He has recently publicly encouraged the use of the MMR vaccine, including in a recent television interview. But not so behind the scenes.
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Kennedy "met with the families of two girls who had died from measles in West Texas" on Sunday, said the report, and while there, he "raised doubts about the safety of vaccines. 'He said, ‘You don’t know what’s in the vaccine anymore,’' Peter Hildebrand, whose 8-year-old daughter, Daisy’s, funeral had been held just hours earlier, told me. 'I actually asked him about it.' The secretary of Health and Human Services had traveled to the small, remote city of Seminole, where 1,000 mourners for Daisy filled the wooden pews of an unmarked Mennonite church."
"After the service, coffee and homemade bread were served at a traditional gathering known as a faspa," noted the report. "Kennedy was there, he wrote on X that afternoon, to 'console the families and to be with the community in their moment of grief.'"
Kennedy previously pushed objections to vaccinating children in American Samoa at the same time a measles outbreak was ravaging the remote Pacific island.
He has also moved for a large-scale study, trying to substantiate the discredited theory linking vaccination to autism, and for the role has tapped David Geier, a discredited researcher punished by Maryland regulators for practicing medicine without a license and running unethical megadose drug experiments on children with autism.
