Health and Human Services Secretary and notorious anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to attend the funeral of a child who recently died of measles.
Kennedy is slated to attend the Sunday ceremony in Lubbock, Texas, NBC reports, after the eight-year-old girl’s death on Thursday as a result of pulmonary failure caused by measles. Her vaccine status remains unclear at this stage.
More than 550 cases of measles have been recorded in West Texas and in the border areas of neighbouring New Mexico and Oklahoma over the past few months, with the most recent death marking the third since January and, before that, since 2015.
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Kennedy has not yet publicly commented on the girl’s passing. The Daily Beast has reached out to the Department of Health and Human Services for comment.
Kennedy has, however, come under fire over the past several weeks for what critics describe as a failure to respond to the ongoing outbreak.
Medical authorities have assailed his promotion of alternative, untested treatments like cod liver oil and vitamin A to combat measles. Dr. Amesh Adalja, a John Hopkins University specialist in infectious diseases, said Kennedy’s crackpot cures are “just distracting people away from what the single message should be, which is to increase the vaccination rate.”
Kennedy has made efforts to distance himself from some of his more hardline comments against vaccines in the past, notably during his heated confirmation hearing in the Senate, during which he claimed to support vaccine use.
“News reports have claimed that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry,” Kennedy said. “I am neither. I am pro-safety.”
Kennedy said critics have labeled him a vaccine “mainly to keep me from asking difficult questions of powerful interests.”
Those “difficult questions” include claiming that “autism comes from vaccines” despite decades of research to the contrary and attempting to block the rollout of coronavirus vaccinations at the height of the pandemic.
That’s all, of course, before you get into his actual view on the diseases themselves: In 2023, Kennedy suggested that COVID-19 had been biochemically engineered “to attack Caucasians and black people.”
