Washington D.C. – The measles misinformation spigot was on full blast at the latest White House event the day after Health Secretary RFK Jr spent over 20 minutes spewing science-defying vaccine disinformation at a conference held by the nation’s leading anti-vax propaganda group.
From the Oval Office today, Kennedy ridiculously claimed the “CDC has not yet received information about the alleged measles death” despite the Pennsylvania Health Department reporting the latest 2 of 4 measles deaths on September 16 and sending a letter that same day to the agency requesting emergency assistance for the “public health response to this outbreak,” which specifically urged “the CDC to acknowledge the loss of four Pennsylvanians to this virus and to transparently report the measles-associated deaths on its public-facing dashboard.”
The request came as the CDC made a sudden and indefensible change to the way it counts measles deaths, from near-real time reporting to “long term” analysis – a transparent effort to cover up measles deaths amid a historic outbreak that Trump and RFK Jr have directly contributed to by telling parents bald-faced lies about the safety of the MMR vaccine.
Meanwhile, Trump doubled down on the completely debunked autism myth: “We’re also going to be demanding the drug companies, with respect to a certain situation — the autism — that they make their doses in 20% shots. So you have shot 1, shot 2, shot 3, shot 4, shot 5 … I think you’re gonna see a massive reduction in autism.”
Absolutely no credible evidence or science exists justifying breaking up MMR vaccine into several pieces. Doing so would do nothing to reduce autism, but will put an enormous new cost and time burden on parents to make multiple doctor visits, inevitably leading to missed shots and greater vulnerability to kids catching measles.
“RFK Jr is right about just one thing: the anti-vax tinfoil hat brigade has a ‘friend at the White House’, which makes Donald Trump public health enemy #1,” said Brad Woodhouse, president of Protect Our Care. “We’re in the middle of a historic measles crisis, and the Trump White House won’t even acknowledge people are dying, let alone lift a finger to stop it. Instead, they keep throwing gas on the fire by invoking discredited autism myths that scare parents away from the only solution out of this mess: the completely safe and effective measles vaccine. The Trump White House is ground zero for measles, and they’re clearly content to keep watching as kids die for no reason.”
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