"Robert F. Kennedy Jr., meanwhile, who one would expect to have spent the year mobilizing a historic vaccination campaign-which is how the disease was eliminated in the first place-instead spent his time waffling over whether the MMR vaccine is considered safe, while praising and touting alternative treatments for people already infected with measles rather than attempting to prevent those infections in the first place."
"In the wake of the West Texas outbreak, RFK Jr. touted several medications as direct measles treatments that have no scientific literature backing them up for treatment of the disease, the steroid budesonide and the antibiotic clarithromycin. There are no approved drugs specifically proven to help those infected with measles recover faster, but that didn't stop Kennedy from claiming that those meds had "very, very good results" in treating Texas children in vaccine-distrusting Mennonite communities in particular."
Statements that only sick or disabled children die from measles imply those lives are expendable and ignore that healthy children can also die. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. offered mixed messages about the MMR vaccine, at times encouraging vaccination and at other times casting doubt. He promoted budesonide and clarithromycin as measles treatments despite no scientific evidence that they shorten recovery. Two unvaccinated children in the West Texas outbreak died. Measles was previously controlled through vaccination, and the last U.S. child death from measles before this outbreak occurred in 2003.
Read at Jezebel
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