During a Past Measles Outbreak, RFK Jr. Dismissed Concern as “Hysteria”
Mother Jones illustration; Michael Brochstein/Zuma; Getty
In early 2015, the California Department of Public Health identified a case of measles in an 11-year-old who had recently traveled to Disneyland. Within a month, at least 125 US residents were stricken with the disease. About a third of them had visited the Magic Kingdom theme park, many were unvaccinated, and the outbreak spread to Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, as well as Canada and Mexico. This burst of measles prompted much public discussion about vaccine hesitancy. Yet Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed concern about the outbreak as “hysteria.”
At the time, several state legislatures were considering measures that would limit vaccine exemptions, in many cases ending the ability of parents to skirt immunization requirements for their children by citing a personal belief (as opposed to a medical reason). As one of the most prominent anti-vaxxers in the nation, Kennedy opposed these bills.
With Kennedy now leading the Department of Health and Human Services during a measles outbreak and providing medical advice that public health experts say is misguided (if not dangerous), this past episode reveals his troubling attitude toward measles and vaccines.
In early March 2015, Kennedy traveled to Salem, Oregon, to lobby against one of the state measures that would remove the personal-belief exemption. In a local theater, he screened a film called Trace Amounts that alleged there was a link between mercury in vaccines and autism and that assailed public health officials and researchers as corrupt fraudsters. But scientific studies had debunked the notion of a link between autism and vaccines. An infamous 1998 study conducted by a British medical researcher named Andrew Wakefield—based on just 12 children—that tied the measles vaccine to autism had been discredited years earlier and retracted by the journal that had published it.
Still, Kennedy continued to push this claim. At the Salem event, before a small audience of Oregon state lawmakers, legislative staffers, and vaccine opponents, he declared vaccines were causing autism in children. He pressed the legislators to reject the bill. Kennedy was accompanied by Brian Hooker, another anti-vax proponent. Hooker had published a paper claiming there was a connection between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism among young Black boys, and he had asserted the Centers for Disease Control was covering this up. But in October 2014, five months before this screening, the journal that had published his article retracted it, noting a “post-publication peer review raised concerns about the validity of the methods and statistical analysis” used by Hooker.
The day after the Salem event, Kennedy sent an email to several of his comrades in the anti-vax movement in which he suggested “the impetus for the current measles hysteria and the leap to close vaccine exemptions in state legislatures is being orchestrated by the vaccine industry.” He noted it was “very clear” that the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) was pushing these measures. NACCHO, no surprise, was at the time urging local health departments to promote vaccination.
Kennedy, in his email, which was obtained by Mother Jones, noted he had been “told” that NACCHO was “being funded by the vaccine industry” and suggested it was nefariously being used by the Big Pharma to whip up public sentiment in favor of vaccinations. He also informed his associates that he had shared this information with “various state legislators” and that this allegation encouraged these lawmakers to view the reaction to the measles outbreak not as “a public health crisis” but as “another familiar manipulation by a greedy industry that is manipulating their credulous colleagues as proxies, while skillfully remaining invisible from the sidelines.” He asked the other anti-vaxxers to “look out for” evidence of this relationship, adding, “I will know how to put it to good use for maximum effect.”
His email suggests that Kennedy was spreading the allegation that NACCHO was fronting for the vaccine industry without having confirmed that was true.
A NACCHO spokesperson refuted Kennedy’s characterization that it has been an agent of the vaccine industry and said that NACCHO’s 2015 annual report does not list any vaccine manufacturers among its funders.
That year, the annual report for the group disclosed 37 financial supporters. On the roster were Gilead Sciences and Janssen Therapeutics, two pharmaceutical companies. But both focused on developing antiviral drugs, especially for treatment of HIV/AIDS, not vaccines. (Janssen Therapeutics was an affiliate of Johnson & Johnson.) The group of NACCHO backers also included the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Society Association, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control, Johns Hopkins University, the National Marrow Donor Program, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the University of Nebraska, and other governmental, academic, and philanthropic entities.
A source familiar with NACCHO’s operation said that the vast majority of its funding has come from grants provided by the federal government, particularly the CDC. The group has tended to focus its advocacy at the federal level and not engaged in state issues.
The Oregon bill that Kennedy lobbied against was eventually withdrawn in the face of the opposition that Kennedy contributed to. The following year California became the first state in almost three decades to end non-medical exemptions from vaccine requirements for schoolchildren.
Kennedy’s 2015 email is telling. It showed that he did not take seriously the measles outbreak of that year and that he leaned toward a conspiracy theory that pharmaceutical companies were diabolically and secretly orchestrating a fake crisis in order to boost vaccine sales. Kennedy also acknowledged he was spreading this paranoid speculation without having obtained solid proof. These are worrying signs given he’s now in charge of the federal government’s response to the current outbreak that is continuing to spread.
Mother Jones sent Kennedy and HHS a list of questions about his approach to the 2015 outbreak, asking if he considers the current concern about measles to be hysteria, believes vaccine makers are now ginning up such worry to increase their profits, and still thinks the MMR vaccine causes autism and other harm. They did not respond.