During testimony before a House committee on Wednesday, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told lawmakers that the public should not rely on him to dispense health advice.
The mission of HHS, according to its website, is to “enhance the health and well-being of all Americans, by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services.”
Yet, when questioned by Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan (Wisconsin) regarding whether he would encourage getting vaccinated, Kennedy refused to give a straight answer — despite numerous studies showing that recommended vaccines are both safe and effective.
“If you had a child today, would you vaccinate that child for measles?” Pocan asked Kennedy.
The HHS secretary said he “probably” would, but that his “opinions about vaccines are irrelevant.”
Pocan then inquired about other vaccines, including vaccines to prevent chickenpox and polio. Kennedy again refused to give any recommendations, stating he didn’t “want to be giving advice” on vaccines to parents. (Kennedy also asserted that countries in Europe “don’t use the chickenpox vaccine,” even though most European countries recommend it and a few require it.)
In response, Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Connecticut) chided Kennedy, saying:
HHS makes medical decisions every day. You’re making medical decisions every day. You’re the secretary of HHS. You have tremendous power over health policy. I’m really horrified that you will not encourage families to vaccinate their children.
Despite claiming that he doesn’t want to give advice on vaccines, Kennedy has a long history of championing dangerous anti-vaxx conspiracy theories, and has used his office to peddle other unscientific claims, including the idea that “sugar is poison” and bigoted falsehoods about autistic people.
Kennedy admitted earlier this year that an MMR vaccination is the best way to protect against measles infection. But he also downplayed the importance of prevention, errantly claiming that Vitamin A supplements and cod liver oil are effective remedies to treat measles, resulting in children getting sick from overuse of those methods.
The health secretary has also falsely asserted that the Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccine series isn’t effective, wrongly insinuating that it doesn’t offer lifetime protection — despite the fact that a two-dose regimen works 97 percent of the time.
Since the start of this year, there have been over 1,000 measles cases in the U.S. If the outbreaks carry on at this pace, the country will see the highest number of cases in a single calendar year since the virus was declared virtually eradicated in the early 2000s — and possibly the highest levels since the early 1990s, when guidelines were updated to include a second dose of the MMR vaccine to prevent the spread of measles.
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