The six-year-old girl at the children’s hospital in Lubbock, Texas, burned with fever and struggled to breathe. Doctors soon put her on a ventilator, snaking a thick tube down the child’s throat so a machine could breathe for her; they placed IVs to rehydrate her tiny body and they prescribed antibiotics for any bacterial infections that may have taken hold in the weeks she had spent at home battling measles. Within a day of being ventilated, the child went into shock, her blood pressure crashed and she went into cardiac arrest.
She could not be resuscitated. Her family, and the nation, mourned: she was the first child to die of measles in the US in a decade. Yet some anti-vaccine activists soon began claiming that the girl died from medical malpractice, not measles, revealing a playbook that they are now running in Pennsylvania amid a growing outbreak – a message taken up by Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and a longtime anti-vaccine activist, as he publicly disputes the rising death toll.
The deaths in the US from measles – now numbering eight in less than two years – are a political minefield for Kennedy, centering him in a public backlash after years of his false claims about the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. The deflection campaign is already having real-world consequences beyond the rising body count. Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group previously led by Kennedy, claims to have sparked malpractice investigations into the doctors who treated the two young unvaccinated girls who died from measles amid last year’s outbreak in west Texas, which infected at least 762 people.
Because in each case, inappropriate antibiotics were prescribed, and that, I believe, led to both girls’ deaths.” Paul Offit, an infectious diseases pediatrician and internationally recognized vaccine expert, said “it’s not a good look” for Kennedy and other anti-vaxxers for so many cases and deaths to rise. The issue at hand is that we’re having these large measles outbreaks, and they’re not stopping.” It’s not just the deaths – it’s also the severe disease, Wells said. The “massive” outbreaks affect “families and communities and disrupt lives”, Wells said.
About one in five unvaccinated measles patients are hospitalized. Measles erases immunity to all other illnesses for years, putting patients at risk of other serious infections. And survivors may years later develop severe measles complications such as subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), which is fatal and untreatable.
Last year, Hooker traveled to Texas to interview the deceased six-year-old’s parents, who said they still would not have vaccinated their children. A second child, aged eight, soon died from measles at the same hospital. Hooker asked to see the children’s medical records, and he shared them with Pierre Kory, a critical care physician with no pediatric training who lost his board certifications for promoting Covid misinformation, heavily promoted the anti-parasitic ivermectin as a Covid treatment, and claimed that polio paralysis is caused not by the virus but by pesticides.
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