Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was slammed Wednesday for downplaying a measles outbreak that has led to the country’s first child death from the disease in decades.
Donald Trump’s health secretary waved off the active Texas outbreak—where pediatricians on the ground have reported children being accepted into care unable to properly breathe—as a normal thing that happens every year.
“There have been four measles outbreaks this year in this country, last year there were 16,” he told a reporter from Trump’s cabinet meeting. “It is not unusual, we have measles outbreaks every year.”
Scores of physicians have rung alarm bells that the latest outbreak, impacting over 100 people in West Texas and neighboring New Mexico, is a “crisis” that is far from normal—especially for a disease that was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000.
The Texas Department of State Health Services said Wednesday the child who died from measles was “school-aged” and unvaccinated. They were hospitalized last week and had died by Wednesday morning.
The death is the first since 2015, when measles was blamed as the cause of death for an immunocompromised Washington woman who physicians did not know had the disease until after her death. Before that case, the country had gone 12 years since it had last recorded a measles death of any kind.
Kennedy told reporters there have now been two deaths this year from the disease, which is largely preventable with a widely-available vaccine, but he did not elaborate on the second case.
There were 18 people hospitalized as of Wednesday morning, Texas health officials said. Those in Lubbock, which is ground zero for the outbreak, say that number is steadily growing.
Dr. Lara Johnson, the chief medical officer of a children’s hospital in the city, told NBC News her team has cared for “around 20” kids with measles. Each of those patients were admitted because they were struggling to breathe. None had been vaccinated.
Kennedy’s first public comments about the latest outbreak were at Wednesday’s cabinet meeting.
The scandal-scarred health secretary, who once wrote that measles were not deadly and that outbreaks had been “fabricated” to push people toward “unnecessary and risky” vaccines, has been slammed by critics for his response.
His presence as a prominent figure in the anti-vax community has been credited with leading to an increase in the number of parents who now refuse to vaccinate their children—a movement that may now be causing a spike in measles cases.
Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, a former physician who was slammed by his medical colleagues earlier this month for voting to confirm Kennedy, told parents Wednesday to protect their children from measles by getting the “safe and effective” vaccine.
Kennedy made no such recommendation when given the chance.
Democratic lawmakers called out the 71-year-old Trump cabinet member for his relative silence on what is becoming a growing public health crisis. Sen. Ron Wyden, of Oregon, was among those peeved with Kennedy’s response on Wednesday.
“Nothing about kids dying from measles is normal,” he wrote on X. “Anti-vaxxers like RFK Jr. and the Republicans who enable them are responsible for every single one of these deaths.”
