Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called for people to get the measles vaccine while in the same breath falsely claiming it hasn’t been “safety tested” and its protection is short-lived.
Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist now overseeing federal health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had shied away from a full-throated endorsement of measles vaccinations, instead claiming the vaccine is the “most effective way” to prevent the virus’ spread.
In an interview Wednesday with CBS News, Kennedy said the Trump administration was focused on finding ways to treat people who choose not to get vaccinated. However, there are no approved treatments for measles, which kills almost 3 out of every 1,000 people diagnosed.
Many medical experts have taken issue with his approach to the current measles outbreak, which has included emphasizing unproven treatments and framing vaccination as a personal choice (which some doctors view as a nod to his anti-vaccine supporters).
Kennedy also suggested that measles cases are inevitable in the United States because of ebbing immunity from vaccines — a notion doctors say is false.
“We’re always going to have measles, no matter what happens, as the vaccine wanes very quickly,” Kennedy said.
Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine offer lifelong protection. That’s because the vaccine stimulates the production of memory cells, he said, which can recognize the virus over a lifetime.
“We eliminated measles from this country. That could never happen if immunity waned,” said Offit, who serves on an independent vaccine advisory committee for the FDA.
Aside from occasional outbreaks, measles hasn’t been constantly present in the United States since before 2000. It is introduced locally by international travelers, and from there it can spread among undervaccinated communities.
“The federal government’s position is, my position is, people should get the measles vaccine. But the government should not be mandating those,” Kennedy told CBS News.
The federal government doesn’t mandate childhood vaccines; rather, all 50 states require them for children attending public school. The FDA approves vaccines based on safety and efficacy, and the CDC makes recommendations about who should get them, which states often choose to follow.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, all 50 states have exemptions to vaccine mandates for medical reasons, and all but five have additional exemptions for other reasons, such as religious or personal objections.
The current outbreak was fueled by transmission in a primarily Mennonite community in Gaines County, Texas, where vaccine hesitancy is prevalent. There have been 668 total cases since January, according to NBC News’ tally, including two pediatric deaths and one suspected death in an unvaccinated adult. Before those deaths, the United States hadn’t had a measles death in a decade, and a child hadn’t died of measles since 2003.
Kennedy has pointed to higher case numbers in Europe as evidence that the United States is responding appropriately to the outbreak. But the figure he has cited recently — roughly 127,000 measles cases in Europe — is the total for last year across 53 countries. Low vaccination rates in southeastern Europe were a major contributor, according to the World Health Organization.
“He has this way of kind of twisting things,” said Dr. William Moss, director of the Johns Hopkins International Vaccine Access Center. “We should be comparing measles in the United States this year to measles in the United States in prior years. To say Europe has more cases over one year than we’ve had in three months this year, it’s just a false comparison.”
This year’s count in the United States is the highest since 2019, when there was a major outbreak in Orthodox Jewish communities in New York. Doctors fear the United States could be on the verge of losing its measles elimination status as Kennedy continues to sow doubt about vaccine safety.
“Right now we don’t know the risks of many of these products because they’re not safety tested,” Kennedy told CBS News. “Many of the vaccines are only tested for three or four days with no placebo group.”
Dr. Ofer Levy, director of the precision vaccines program at Boston Children’s Hospital, said vaccine development usually takes 10 to 20 years, with the notable exception of Covid shots, which were brought to market in less than a year thanks to mRNA technology and a coordinated, worldwide effort. (Even then, the foundational research behind mRNA vaccines dates to 1997.)
When it comes to childhood immunizations, many of which were approved decades ago, there may not have been placebo controls or long-term safety follow-ups for each one, Levy said. However, he noted that even after vaccines are approved, various government-led surveillance systems monitor for adverse reactions. And in the rare case they find anything, that vaccine is pulled from the market, he added.
Moss agreed that the types of clinical trials for vaccines have changed over time. However, “I don’t think there’s any other product we use that’s more rigorously evaluated for both safety and efficacy,” he said.
Offit said Kennedy “just keeps picking and picking” at vaccine safety with statements that aren’t scientifically valid — for instance, by suggesting that all childhood vaccines weren’t tested against placebos, when, in fact, many were.
“The problem with RFK Jr. is his definition of ‘placebo,’” Offit said. “His definition of placebo is either water or saline, meaning just normal sodium chloride, but that’s not the FDA’s definition. The FDA’s definition is something that’s inert.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said Kennedy “raised valid concerns about vaccine trial practices, including the use of active comparators instead of inert placebos and short observation windows — issues backed by public data.”
But doctors said there’s a legitimate reason to use active comparators — vaccines that have already been approved for given infections — instead of placebos: It would be unethical to withhold the benefit of a vaccine from study participants, so trials often test new vaccines against older versions.
Levy said there’s always room for more safety studies or longer-term follow-up.
“I think the secretary is right that we could do more to study vaccine safety,” he said. “By all means, let’s dig in. Let’s see, did we miss anything? Should we learn more? But let’s not forget that these vaccines in childhood have averted severe disease in children.”
