Washington D.C. – After months of silence from the Trump-RFK Jr. HHS on the measles outbreak in South Carolina that began in October, the agency finally provided a statement in response to the situation that has now escalated to the worst U.S. outbreak in decades, almost exclusively among the unvaccinated. An HHS spokesperson desperately sought to shift blame from the Trump administration despite its continued pursuit of an aggressive anti-vaccine agenda: “Declines in measles vaccination rates and erosion of public trust began well before this Administration. Public confidence in health institutions was significantly undermined during the COVID era.”
“If the Trump HHS PR Department is really trying to find the guys who did this, they need only walk down the hall and knock on any door of the many top officials RFK Jr. installed in this administration that have promoted baseless anti-vax conspiracies for years,” said Kayla Hancock, Director of Public Health Watch, a project of Protect Our Care. “Secretary Kennedy has surrounded himself with fellow anti-vaccine policy makers not in spite of their records of impugning the integrity of trusted health experts and decades of data that support vaccine science, but because of it. For all the Trump health officials who contributed to the alarming decline in vaccine rates fueling this historic measles outbreak, there’s no mirror big enough for them to stare into as more and more children get needlessly sick.”
A SAMPLE SIZE OF CURRENT TRUMP OFFICIALS THAT FUELED VACCINE SKEPTICISM RESPONSIBLE FOR CURRENT MEASLES OUTBREAK:
- Health Secretary Kennedy:
- RFK Jr. Called The COVID-19 Vaccine “A Crime Against Humanity.” Kennedy has called the COVID-19 vaccine “a crime against humanity” and falsely claimed that it is the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” Kennedy also authored the foreword to a book riddled with false claims that the vaccines had caused a spike in sudden deaths among healthy young people. Experts have estimated that vaccination against COVID-19 saved at least 14.4 million lives worldwide in 2021 alone.
- 83 People Died In A Measles Epidemic In Samoa After Kennedy Helped Fuel A Wave Of Vaccine Hesitancy. In 2019, Kennedy visited Samoa at the invitation of a local anti-vaccine influencer. At the time the island nation was attempting to get its vaccination program back on track after two children died following a nurse’s error in mixing measles vaccines. Kennedy met with the Samoan prime minister and prominent local anti-vaccine activists. A few months later, a measles epidemic broke out in Samoa, killing 83 people, mostly infants and children. Kennedy is also the originator of a debunked conspiracy theory that the Gates Foundation paralyzed 496,000 children in India during a polio vaccine trial.
- Kennedy Says He Accosts Strangers With Babies And Urges Them Not To Vaccinate To “Save” Their Children And That “There’s No Vaccine That Is Safe And Effective.” Kennedy told a podcast on the “state of health freedom” in 2021 that, “our job is to resist and to talk about [vaccines] to everyone.” Kennedy claimed that if he sees someone “on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get vaccinated.’ And he heard that from me. If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it, you know, maybe he will save that child.” In a July 2023 appearance on Lex Fridman’s podcast, when pressed on whether he is opposed to all vaccines, Kennedy said, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” As recently as July 2023, Kennedy was promoting the false idea that vaccines cause autism telling Fox News, “I do believe that autism comes from vaccines.” During the same podcast, Kennedy also urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.”
- Second in command at the CDC, Principal Deputy Director Ralph Abraham has called the Covid-19 vaccine “dangerous” and claimed to see “vaccine-related injuries every day.”
- NIH Director Jay Bhattarchaya has led the move to end funding for the development of mRNA vaccines and experts say few have done more than him to sow doubts about public health institutions and vaccines
- Surgeon General nominee and RFK Jr. ally Calley Means has linked vaccines to autism and called for scaling back childhood vaccines.
- Kirk Milhoan, appointed by RFK Jr. to chair the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, questioned the need for the polio vaccine.
- Kimberly Biss, appointed to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in January is a self-described “anti-vaxxer” and most of RFK’s other appointees to ACIP are vaccine “skeptics” and “critics”
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