Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants more attention for the “amazing job” he’s done tackling the measles outbreak.
In a cabinet meeting Thursday, Kennedy thanked the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) for its work battling the outbreak, saying that “our numbers in this country have now plateaued.”
“We’ve had three measles deaths in this country over 20 years,” he told President Donald Trump.
Now, Kennedy says the he must “refocus the press” on the epidemic of diabetes. During the meeting, the health secretary claimed that 38 percent of young Americans were prediabetic—a disease that was “unknown 30 years ago.”
“Every child that becomes diabetic—there should be a headline about them,” he said.
Despite Kennedy imploring the press to “refocus,” two children have died from measles this year alone, one in February and the other just last week. As of Thursday, over 600 people have contracted it, with 500 of that total originating in Texas.
The HHS secretary visited the families of two of the three people who have died from the disease in West Texas Sunday, sharing on X the “warmth and love” he felt while attending the services of eight-year-old Daisy Hildebrand and six-year-old Kayley Fehr.
Daisy’s father, Peter Hildebrand, told The Atlantic that he had asked Kennedy about the measles vaccine (MMR) during his visit, to which the secretary of health and human services responded, “You don’t know what’s in the vaccine anymore.”
“He never said anything about the vaccine being helpful,” Hildebrand said.
Shortly after his visit, Kennedy seemed to express support for the vaccine, noting that he sent a CDC team to Texas in March to supply clinics and pharmacies with “needed MMR vaccines.”
“Since that time, the growth rates for new cases and hospitalizations have flattened,” he added. “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.”
An HHS spokesperson told The Atlantic in an email that Kennedy “is not anti-vaccine; he is pro-safety.”
But Hildebrand said that Kennedy had questioned the effectiveness of the vaccine.
MAHA and vaccine skeptics say the two girls’ deaths were medical errors. Kennedy’s very own anti-vaccine nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, blamed the hospital for not giving six-year-old Fehr the correct antibiotics they claimed would have saved her.
Hildebrand also holds doctors responsible for his daughter’s death, saying they did not give her the budesonide breathing treatment he had been requesting.
Immunologist and physician Michael Mina said that using budesonide, an anti-inflammatory medication, to treat measles “simply does not, biologically or mechanistically, make sense.”
“I’m willing to do any- and everything I can to make sure the hospitals start getting some ‘act right’ in them so nobody else has to go through this,” Hildebrand said. “They pretty much murdered them.”
Covenant Children’s Hospital that treated Fehr said these were “misleading and inaccurate” claims, and the Texas health department said that Daisy had “no reported underlying conditions.”
Ever since being sworn in as Secretary of Health and Human Services in February amidst rising concerns over the measles outbreak, Kennedy has struggled to present a clear stance on the MMR vaccine.
In an interview with CBS News on Wednesday, Kennedy said that “people should get the measles vaccine, but the government should not be mandating those.”
He then backtracked later on in the interview, saying how “we don’t know the risks of many of these products because they’re not safety tested.”
Though Hildebrand was unaware that Kennedy had shared his daughter’s full name and posted photos of his family on social media—he said he did not want “any of this on the internet from the get-go”—he instead pointed his blame at reporters instead.
“Most of y’all are fake media, and I don’t need my daughter’s name out there to be reported crap on,” he said. “I just don’t need anybody talking negative about my daughter. She’s in the ground.”
