The Secretary of Health, RFK Jr., approves the MMR – Stoking Fury vaccine among his supporters: shots

The Secretary of Health and Social Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., arrives before President Trump speaks during an event to announce new prices on Wednesday at Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, DC

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Mark Schiefelbein / AP

Approval of the measles vaccine, mumps and rubella by the Secretary of Health and Social Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. caused an angry outcry.

“The most effective way to prevent the propagation of measles is the ROR vaccine,” said Kennedy in the third paragraph of a long post on the X social media platform. Kennedy made the post after meetings on Sunday in the county of Gaines, Texas, with the families of two children who died of measles during a recent state epidemic. He also said that he had asked Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to “provide pharmacies and clinics from Texas with MMR vaccines”, as well as other medical supplies.

Kennedy’s approval complies with all the scientific evidence available on the ROR vaccine. “A single dose is effective about 93% to prevent the disease, and the second dose obtains up to 97%,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Philadelphia Children’s Hospital. According to the Texas Department of State Health Services, only 10 of the 481 cases of measles recorded from April 4 were in partially or fully vaccinated individuals – or about 2% of all overall cases. Until now, three unvaccinated people, the two children in Texas and an adult in New Mexico, have died of the disease.

“I am delighted to hear what secretary Kennedy said about the donations of vaccination,” said Dr. Kathryn Edwards, a retirement professor of pediatric infectious diseases. Edwards said that she hoped for an explicit approval of the vaccine much earlier in January, but that “it is better late than never”.

But Kennedy’s suggestion that the vaccine was effective made several members of the anti-vaccine community who responded to the declaration on X.

Anti-vaccination

“I’m sorry, but there is no defense for this poorly written statement,” wrote Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, an eminent anti-vaccine activist who has already affirmed during an Ohio legislative hearing that the cocovid vaccine could make patients become magnetized, which allows them to stick “ways and subordinate” throughout their body.

Del Bigtree, an eminent anti-Vaccin activist who supported Kennedy’s presidential race and recently co-founded a non-profit organization with him called Maha Action, also questioned the approval of the Secretary of Health. Bigtree suggested that Kennedy’s post had “been cut”. He then made unproven statements on vaccines and autism, and linked to a documentary he had made on the subject.

“We voted for challenging the medical establishment, which does not approve of it,” said Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, a doctor based in Texas who opposed Coids vaccines and who is currently fighting a complaint from the Texas Medical Commission for the privileges of admission to the hospital. Bowden says that the complaint is linked to its prescribed Ivermectin patients. The ivermectin is an alternative therapy not proven for the cocoat.

“Kennedy was one of those candidates who attracted people who could not vote for Trump,” Bowden told NPR in an interview. Much of the attraction came from people who were “very fed up with what happened during the pandemic,” she said. “Neither Biden or Trump were even ready to talk about the pandemic, and Kennedy was,” she said.

A funeral procession is seen after the second death of measles in the state, Sunday April 6, 2025, in Seminole, Texas.

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She says that Kennedy’s decision to have the ROR vaccine approved to control the epidemic reminds her of the heavy answer to Covid.

“Do we need to make a proclamation,” OK, is that what must be done “?” she said. “This is what rubs me in the wrong direction.”

Kennedy’s declaration also contradicts years of his own vaccination skepticism. The Secretary of Health has already chaired an anti-Vaccin non-profit organization called Children’s Health Defense which, during a measles epidemic in 2019, tried to continue New York for the state vaccination requirement. He finally lost the matter.

In 2023, during an interview with the popular Podcaster Joe Rogan, Kennedy denied that the measles vaccine had led to a drop in deaths. He said that malnutrition was the deep cause of the death of measles and when the vaccine made its debut in 1963, mortality was already low. The few deaths that took place “were all children of the Mississippi Delta, black children, seriously ill-fed and they died of measles,” he told Rogan. Kennedy has not mentioned any evidence of this complaint.

In his new role, the Secretary of Health has sometimes recognized the effectiveness of the Ror. “Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons,” he wrote in an editorial on Fox News on March 2. But in the same article, Kennedy said that vitamin A “considerably reduces the mortality of measles”. Offer says that vitamin A does not affect the evolution of the disease in developed countries like the United States, and that it can damage the liver of children in large doses. The public media in Texas reported that several children in western Texas were hospitalized with a toxicity of vitamin following its press release.

Alternative

We did not know why Kennedy chose this moment to explicitly approve the Ror shot. The Ministry of Health and Social Services did not immediately respond to the request for NPR comments. In a second post later Sunday evening, Kennedy published photos posing with the families of those who had lost children and promoted two therapies, “Budesonide and Clarithromycin aerosolized”.

Budesonide is an inhaled steroid used to treat asthma and has “no role in measles,” says Offer. Clarithromycin is an oral antibiotic, but offered that it is the bad type of antibiotic to treat secondary bacterial infections caused by measles. “These two things are worthless,” he said.

Offer says that, despite Kennedy’s online approval, he expects the measles epidemic to continue and may worsen. “This is a massive epidemic that is not controlled,” said Offer. Measles were eliminated in the United States in 2000, but it again kills children. “I have never been so upset; it’s so difficult to look at that.”

Selena Simons-Duffin of NPR and Rob Stein contributed to this report.