RFK Jr. Falsely Claims Measles Vax Causes Deaths ‘Every Year’

In this MedPage Today video, Paul Offit, MD, of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, responds to claims about measles and vaccines made by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in recent interviews.

The following is a transcript of their remarks:

Kennedy [clip]: There are adverse events from the vaccine. It does cause deaths every year. It causes all the illnesses that measles itself cause, encephalitis and blindness, etc., and so people ought to be able to make that choice for themselves.

Offit: People aren’t going to be making a good choice for themselves if they hear Robert F. Kennedy Jr. say, falsely, that measles vaccine causes deaths. It doesn’t cause deaths, but it is a live attenuated or weakened virus, and so here’s what it can cause.

It can cause, about 14 days or so after inoculation, a lowering of the platelet cells that circulate in your body that help the blood to clot. You can get this sort of showering of what looks like broken blood vessels that is very short-lived and has no sequelae, and that happens about one in 35,000 people that get vaccinated. The vaccine can also cause a low-grade fever and a mild measles rash that lasts for a few days, but that’s it.

I mean, when RFK Jr. says that measles vaccine kills children every year — especially at a time when this virus is raging through West Texas and now spilling over into New Mexico and Oklahoma — is a disingenuous and frankly harmful thing to say because it scares people unnecessarily.

Kennedy [clip]: The vaccine wanes about 4.5% per year, so that means older people are essentially unvaccinated. Their immune system is not protected, and it used to be when you and I were kids, everybody got measles and the measles gave you lifetime protection against measles infection. The vaccine doesn’t do that. The vaccine is effective for some people for life, but many people it wanes.

Offit: Measles is a long incubation period disease. That means from the time when you’re first exposed to the time that you develop symptoms is a fairly long period of time, 10 days, 14 days, sometimes as long as 21 days. So all you need to protect yourself against measles is memory cells, memory cells that can make antibodies, but you don’t have to have antibodies in your circulation. You don’t, because antibodies in your circulation are relatively short-lived, but memory cells are long-lived, typically a lifetime, and that’s enough to protect you against measles.

Now, the reason you know that memory doesn’t fade is we eliminated measles from this country by the year 2000 — gone. If memory faded, that wouldn’t have been possible. So he’s wrong. Measles immunity doesn’t fade.

Kennedy [clip]: The death rate for measles in our country in 1963 prior to the introduction of the vaccines was about one in 1,200 to one in 10,000, so it’s a very, very low infection fatality rate. The overall population death rate of measles was about one in a half a million.

Offit: The current mortality rate for measles is around one in 1,000. Roughly. Prior to the vaccine, say in the early 1900s, more children died of measles than currently.

The reason for the drop, the big reason for the drop occurred in the 1940s, because we had something in the 1940s that we didn’t have before that which was antibiotics. And although antibiotics don’t treat viruses directly, there can be bacterial superinfections like bloodstream infections or pneumonia, bacterial pneumonia on top of a measles infection that can cause harm and death, and so it was really the advance of antibiotics that lowered the mortality rate to around 0.1% or one per thousand.

Kennedy [clip]: It’s very, very difficult for measles to kill a healthy person, so if you’re healthy, well nourished. In fact, measles at one point was killing about 10,000 people a year in our country at the time, but those deaths were eliminated through nutrition and sanitation.

Offit: Again, the lowering of the death rate in this country owed almost solely to the development of antibiotics in the 1940s, had nothing to do with nutrition, had nothing to do with sanitation. Measles virus can certainly kill and typically does kill children who are well nourished.

I am a veteran of the 1991 Philadelphia measles epidemic where there were 1,400 cases and nine deaths over a period of 3 months. Every one of those deaths was in healthy children who were well nourished. The 6-year-old girl in West Texas who recently died of measles was well nourished, as the doctor who took care of her said.

So when he says it’s only poorly nourished people who suffer severe or fatal measles, in many ways, he’s blaming the parent, and that’s wrong because measles can kill anybody.

Kennedy [clip]: The Mennonites have told me and their leaders there’s a number of vaccine-injured kids, about a dozen in that community, and when I said, I’m going to send CDC and we have a CDC team arriving today, and I said that to the Mennonites, they said, well, we want them to also look at our vaccine-injured kids and look them in the eye.

Offit: So what vaccine injuries as he’s talking about? Typically Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is of the belief that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, for example, causes autism or neurodevelopmental delays. He has been spouting that for the last 20 years, even though there are now more than 15 studies that have been done in seven countries on three continents, clearly showing that you are at no greater risk of getting autism or neurodevelopmental delays if you got a vaccine or if you didn’t.

So he makes it up, and what’s worse is he goes into a community and continues to stoke fears about measles-containing vaccine, saying that the measles vaccine is short-lived in terms of how long the immunity lasts. Saying that measles vaccine causes brain swelling, encephalitis, saying that measles vaccine causes permanent and severe harm. It is an irresponsible thing to do.

What he should be doing is he should be going to West Texas and New Mexico and Oklahoma and declaring loudly and clearly, “Vaccinate your children,” because that’s the only way to prevent this infection. When he starts talking about things like cod liver oil or budesonide or clarithromycin, it’s like the modern day hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin in COVID, which is it’s popular, it’s widely used in West Texas, and it is of no value.

Kennedy [clip]: I went to measles parties when I was a kid. I went to a chickenpox party and I had natural immunity, and there’s a lot of studies out there that show that if you actually do get the wild infection, you’re protected later. It boosts your immune system later in life against cancers, atopic diseases, cardiac disease, etc. It’s not well studied. It ought to be well studied because we ought to understand those relationships, but I would never advise somebody to get sick.

Offit: While it is true that before there was a measles vaccine or before there was a chickenpox vaccine, if you got either of those two diseases as an adult, you were more likely to develop severe pneumonia and hospitalization than if you got those diseases as a child. So it wasn’t completely crazy before there was a vaccine to go to those parties.

Now, it is completely crazy because we have a vaccine for measles and we have a vaccine for chickenpox, both of which provide you with the immunity that is a consequence of natural infection without having to pay the price of natural infection.

The one person or people who were not sitting next to him, for example, were the 500 children who would die every year of measles. Not sitting next to him were the 75-100 children who would die every year from chickenpox. So it’s called survivor bias.

He tells this story proudly because he was someone who survived measles and chickenpox. But not everybody did. Now, we don’t have to worry about measles parties or chickenpox parties because we have vaccines that can induce immunity that’s protective without having to pay the price of that immunity.

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