The war against children's health

The ongoing measles outbreak signals a forthcoming public health crisis

RFK Jr’s recent Fox News op-ed, “Measles outbreak is a call to action for all of us,” set off a firestorm from his MAHA stans. The subhead (which he also likely did not write) stated “MMR vaccine is crucial to avoiding potentially deadly disease.”

Pure kryptonite for anti-vaxxers.

What Kennedy certainly wrote (or had someone write for him, but approved), is this hinge point for the unhinged:

Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.

Sure, this about as far as he’ll go to admitting vaccines work, but for the anti-vax coalition he’s helped build as founder of Children’s Health Defense and through his relentless work spreading vaccine misinformation (including the debunked theory that the MMR vaccine causes autism), this was a betrayal.

As we’ll see, MAHA isn’t willing to abandon their champion…yet. After initial outrage, more considered deflections came flooding in.

One thing I’ve learned in years of covering Bobby is that the man cannot help himself. He refuses to jeopardize his contrarian street cred. In the same op-ed, he claims that “Studies have found that vitamin A can dramatically reduce measles mortality.” He links to a 2010 journal article, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is rather funny given this is what he said about Bill during a Turning Point PAC speech in October:

Bill Gates had just donated $50 million to the Kamala Harris campaign. It was a dark money donation. He didn’t intend for it to be public. He’s been indicted in the Netherlands for lying to the public about the Covid vaccine. Do you think that he wants to go to trial here in the United States of America? Do you think maybe that’s one of the reasons he gave $50 million to Kamala Harris?

First off, Gates was never indicted in the Netherlands. Facts rarely make for good propaganda, however, especially in front of his savage crowd of hungry banshees.

Besides, if something helps support his message, what’s the harm? But: does this journal article actually support vitamin A preventing measles mortality?

Sort of?

When providing vitamin A to malnourished children in Africa with two specific doses—200k international units for children, 100k for infants—reduced mortality was achieved. But that’s it—and it doesn't necessarily mean it’s the right protocol for anyone except malnourished children in Africa.

Kevin Klatt, an assistant research scientist and instructor in the Department of Nutrition Sciences and Toxicology at UC Berkeley, breaks it down in “Vitamin A for Measles.”

All studies were conducted in regions in Africa, in study populations where vitamin A deficiency is common. The relevance to countries with less vitamin A deficiency and less diarrheal disease is not clear.

The doses used here are very high, largely because vitamin A is a fat soluble vitamin that can be stored and mobilized. The units here are a bit weird but for reference the daily recommended intakes for children are 300-700 micrograms of retinol. The 200,000IU being used in measles treatment recommendations equates to 60,000micrograms (100-200X the daily recommended dose to maintain vitamin A levels in the body). I have to call this out because we are in the era of carnivore influencers selling people encapsulated beef liver extolling the benefits of vitamin A- despite liver being a rich source of vitamin A, it comes nowhere close to the doses we’re talking about here.

That’s not the only slipperiness in Kennedy’s op-ed, but let’s move on, because last Tuesday he appeared on Fox News to discuss the measles outbreak with physician, Dr Marc Siegel. He said this:

They have treated most of the patients, actually—over 108 patients in the last 48 hours—and they’re getting very, very good results, they report, from Budesonide, which is a steroid, a 30-year-old steroid, and Erythromycin, and Cod Liver Oil, which has high concentrations of Vitamin A and Vitamin D.

Did Bobby mention vaccines once? Not initially. The original video was re-edited to include vaccines, though even then it was as an aside, reiterating his mostly evasive language on the topic. Besides that op-ed (which he only shared on his government social media account), not a peep about the efficacy or necessity of vaccines to be found.

How about those other recommendations? Ashish Jha, who served as the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator under President Biden, weighs in.

While Kennedy has limited mention of vaccines, that single citation was enough to infuriate MAHA stans. HealthRanger (Mike Adams), founder of pseudoscience clearing house Natural News, said that RFK is “now practically a spokesperson for the vaccine industry,” before taking it back a few hours later, informing his 282k followers he “still has faith” in Bobby.

The next day Adams shared an article from Robert Malone. You likely remember Robert as the self-proclaimed “inventor of mRNA technology” who went rogue during Covid. Of course, that’s not true, as hundreds of people contributed to the development of mRNA. While Malone was one of them, his ego precedes him.

The article, written by Canadian actress Sofia Karstens (for some reason), is…long. And tiring. And expectable. But this graph jumps out:

I probably don’t need to say it but I will out of the gate, that the headline of RFK Jr’s op-ed was not reflective of the contents, which in my experience indicates the headline was added later, possibly by opposition, to mislead the public into a narrative not inherent in Bobby’s actual words. (Proverbial “they” do this to him a lot).

As I flagged, Bobby likely didn’t write the headline or subhead. But Fox News, who two days later gave him a softball interview about the outbreak, is now the “opposition?”

Then there’s GreenMedInfo founder, Sayer Ji, who penned a piece harkening back to the good ol’ “pull your health up by your Reaganomics bootstraps” days, titled “The MAHA Crisis: Why Our Health Freedom Depends on Us—Not Any One Leader.”

He tries to coin his own acronym in the subhead: “No one is coming to save us—it's up to us to reclaim health freedom and for you to Make Yourself Healthy Again (MYHA).”

Rolls right off the tongue.

I recently shared a clip of Sayer advocating for getting infected with measles as an “immunological rite of passage” on Children’s Health Defense TV; he also claims measles is protective against certain forms of cancer.

Over here in reality, research in oncolytic virotherapy that selectively infects and kills cancer cells is being conducted, and a specific strain of measles (Edmonston) is being studied to target cancer cells. This has nothing to do with natural measles infection. And these therapies are still being tested. There’s no research supporting the idea that natural measles infection protects against cancer.

Ji talks about attending Bobby’s confirmation hearings, “physically cringing” when Bobby swore to uphold the current vaccine schedule, saying that the phrase “safe and effective” was disproven during the “dark chapter of history” known as Covid-19. He then talks about what he thinks MAHA really entails:

And yet, if this moment proves anything, it is this: no government, no MAHA Commission, no HHS Secretary—Bobby included—is going to save us. We must save ourselves. The responsibility to reclaim our health, assert our bodily sovereignty, and dismantle t he lie that vaccines are unequivocally safe and effective falls squarely on us. The only way MAHA will succeed is if we Make Ourselves Healthy Again first.

Perhaps this latest twist of fate is teaching us a painful but necessary lesson: politics is a meat grinder, and one of our own—someone to whom many of us have tethered our hopes—is caught in its relentless gears. We feel the pressure, the squeeze, even the pain of it. But maybe that’s not a curse; maybe it’s a call to action. If we don’t pull ourselves free, we risk watching this machine grind not just Bobby, but our movement—and the lives of countless children—into dust once more. The time to act is now…

I wonder if Ji also thinks Fox News is now the opposition, part of the “machine.” It would make sense, given that anti-vaxxers share qualities with staunch religious fundamentalists who only accept one version—theirs—of reality, and anything or anyone in opposition to that must be compromised, or have another agenda. Because MAHA can only be pure and beneficial and truthful, in their estimation.

Other estimations are far more important for individual and public health. Too bad those professionals are bogged down in this unforced error. Doctors in West Texas, whose jobs are already difficult enough, now have to add MAHA-inspired re-education to their plate, as with the case of Dr. Ana Montanez.

Increasingly, however, she also has to counter misleading information. One mother, she said, told her she was giving her two children high doses of vitamin A to ward off measles, based on an article posted by Children's Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. nearly a decade before he became President Donald Trump’s top health official.

As of yesterday, the measles outbreak has spread to a dozen states, with 230 confirmed cases in West Texas and New Mexico. Cod liver oil ain’t gonna stop this, either.

On a personal note, I received an MMR vaccine on Thursday at Costco (following a Walgreen’s fiasco). I felt sluggish but functional on Friday. Given I received my MMR vaccine in the seventies, before the current two-shot protocol was recommended, I went with an abundance of caution. And since titer tests are not covered by my insurance, it was a cost-effective decision.

While the circumstances that led me to that decision are due to the chronic misinformation spread by anti-vaxxers, I’m grateful for having (somewhat) easy access to this vaccine. Plus, the technician told me everything I needed to know about my upcoming shingles vaccines when I turn 50 in June.

As too many people are realizing too late right now, prevention is key. In a slight bit of good news, West Texas is running out of MMR vaccines due to a surge in demand—not good that they’re running out, but very good that the signal is breaking through the anti-vaxxer’s relentless noise.