The US health secretary expresses his “deep concern” over the Texas epidemic.
In the midst of a fatal measles outbreak in Texas, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the country’s top health officer and a renowned skeptic of vaccines, has supported the vaccination.
In a Sunday Fox News opinion article, Kennedy expressed his “deep concern” over the disease’s spread, even though he had previously stated that it was “not unusual.”
Kennedy stated that vaccination is “a personal one,” but added that “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.”
Prior to the MMR vaccine, “almost every child” in the US had measles, according to the US secretary of health and human services.
For instance, he stated, “between 1953 and 1962, there were, on average, 530,217 confirmed cases and 440 deaths in the United States, resulting in a case fatality rate of 1 in 1,205 cases.”
Following the hospitalization of an unvaccinated school-aged child in northwest Texas with measles last month, US authorities announced the first measles death in the nation in ten years.
The Texas Department of State Health Services reported that as of Friday, 146 cases have been reported in the state since late January.
A community of Mennonites, a Christian sect that sprung from the radical elements of the 16th-century Reformation, has been the focus of the cases, according to health officials.
Kennedy, who has defended scientifically debunked studies that connect vaccines to autism, came under fire last month when he seemed to minimize the outbreak by pointing out that there had previously been other outbreaks this year.
For those who are not vaccinated, such as small infants who are normally ineligible for vaccination, measles can be extremely deadly.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, around one in five unvaccinated people in the United States who contract measles end up in the hospital, and approximately one in every 20 children who contract the illness develop pneumonia.
