RFK Jr. Telling Grieving Texas Families About the Measles Vaccine

I read this in my recent Atlantic magazine subscription. The story about the lack of inoculation with Measles Vaccine is stunning. The results being a child dying. The comments by Robert who hails from an important political family are stunningly false. If you believe what he says, everything said by those who favor vaccines is a lie or made up. Robert has no credentials to say such and still he claims such.

If you have been anywhere near the manufacture of drugs, vaccines, etc., you do know what is in them. How they are to be used and whether they are effective. But that type of knowledge would not be supportive of Robert’s false facts on healthcare and the use of drugs.

So we have the deaths of two children as reported in this article. And the blame is on the vaccine rather than the failure to inoculate.

What RFK Jr. Says About the Measles Vaccine in Private – The Atlantic

On Sunday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. met with the families of two girls who had died from measles in West Texas—and raised doubts about the safety of vaccines.

“He said, ‘You don’t know what’s in the vaccine anymore,’” Peter Hildebrand, whose 8-year-old daughter, Daisy’s, funeral had been held just hours earlier, told me. “I actually asked him about it.”

The secretary of Health and Human Services had traveled to the small, remote city of Seminole, where 1,000 mourners for Daisy filled the wooden pews of an unmarked Mennonite church. After the service, coffee and homemade bread were served at a traditional gathering known as a faspa. Kennedy was there, he wrote on X that afternoon, to “console the families and to be with the community in their moment of grief.”

The slow-brewing crisis, in which more than 600 people have been infected with measles and three have died—America’s first deaths from the disease in a decade—has left Kennedy in an awkward position. For many years, he has been the country’s most prominent anti-vaccine activist. Americans “have been misled by the pharmaceutical industry and their captured government agency allies into believing that measles is a deadly disease and that measles vaccines are necessary, safe, and effective,” he wrote in a foreword to a 2021 book. Since taking office, though, he has moderated his tone, at times endorsing the shots’ importance to public health. In his public post from Seminole, Kennedy did so once again, describing his department’s efforts to supply Texas pharmacies and clinics with “needed MMR vaccines,” which he called “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles.”

Yet there’s ample reason to believe that Kennedy hasn’t really changed his views:

“I have worked with Bobby for many years, and I can confidently say that he has a heart that is incapable of compromise,”

Del Bigtree, the communications director for Kennedy’s independent presidential campaign, said on X, in an effort to reassure some angry and confused supporters. “He is at a poker table with the slyest serpents in the world,” he added; “we should not ask him to show his cards.” (Bigtree also called the MMR vaccine “one of the most effective ways to cause autism,” despite the fact that study after study has disproved the link.) Indeed, when I spoke with Hildebrand by phone on Monday, I learned that Kennedy was questioning vaccines behind the scenes, even in the midst of his condolence trip to Texas.

“He never said anything about the vaccine being helpful,” Hildebrand told me. He did not want to go into more detail about his conversation with Kennedy, saying he’d been advised (he didn’t say by whom) not to make any public comments. But he seemed to view the secretary’s statement as confirmation that the MMR vaccine is untrustworthy. Notwithstanding his daughter’s death, he claimed that the children of another member of his family, who were vaccinated, still got sicker in the recent outbreak than two of his own children who had gotten measles and recovered. “So the vaccine ain’t about shit,” he said. A Health and Human Services spokesperson would not confirm what Kennedy had said to Hildebrand. “Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine, he is pro-safety,” the spokesperson wrote by email. “He has consistently made that clear.”

Among vaccine skeptics, the death of Daisy Hildebrand, like the earlier death of 6-year-old Kayley Fehr, is being reframed as the consequence of a tragic and egregious medical error. Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine nonprofit Kennedy founded, has pushed the theory that Fehr wasn’t given the correct antibiotic for pneumonia soon enough to save her life, apparently basing that judgment on medical records the Fehrs provided to the organization. Covenant Children’s Hospital, where Fehr was treated, has called such claims “misleading and inaccurate,” while pointing out that patient-confidentiality laws prevent the hospital from going into detail about the girl’s treatment. Robert Malone, a doctor and former researcher known for sharing concerns —and misinformation—about COVID-19 vaccines, posted on his Substack that Daisy’s death was “a case of a child suffering from pre-existing conditions who was misdiagnosed.” (Texas’s health department says that the girl had “no reported underlying conditions.”)

Hildebrand, too, blames doctors for the deaths. “I’m willing to do any- and everything I can to make sure the hospitals start getting some ‘act right’ in them so nobody else has to go through this,” he said. “They pretty much murdered them.” In the case of his daughter, he believes the hospital should have given her budesonide, a steroid often prescribed for asthma, among other conditions, that has been touted by Kennedy for treating measles. “They didn’t give her the budesonide breathing treatment that we’d been asking for,” Hildebrand said. “They were saying that the IV steroids they were giving her were better.” A spokesperson for University Medical Center in Lubbock didn’t respond to a request for comment.

According to Michael Mina, a physician and an immunologist who studies measles, budesonide is not a first-line treatment for measles. “The use of budesonide to try to treat measles simply does not, biologically or mechanistically, make sense,” Mina told me.

“Where it could potentially make sense is treating a co-infection that’s occurring in conjunction with measles, but that is far from a measles therapy. This is not something that we should be treating measles with.” Mina added that it is “much better to prevent measles in the first place through vaccination.”

Hildebrand said that, before they took Daisy to the hospital, his family was given advice on her care by, among others, Ben Edwards and Richard Bartlett, two West Texas doctors whom Kennedy has praised as “extraordinary healers” treating measles patients in Seminole. Edwards and Bartlett are pictured in a photo that Kennedy posted from his meeting with the two families, which occurred after the funeral at a steak dinner at the West Texas Living Heritage Museum, in Seminole. Like Kennedy, Edwards has raised doubts about the safety of the MMR vaccine and instead promoted treatments such as cod-liver oil, which is high in vitamins A and D. At one point, he was offering free cod-liver oil to Seminole residents at an ad hoc clinic next to a coffee shop.

Hildebrand said his family had been in touch with Bartlett and Edwards. Daisy was given vitamin A. “It all seemed to work,” he told me. “When she started needing oxygen so bad, we didn’t have the equipment at home, and neither did they have all the equipment at their clinics, so obviously we had to look for further help at the hospital.” In an email, Edwards denied that Daisy Hildebrand was one of his patients.

“No, I did not treat her, but plan to get the medical records to review to see if standard of care was followed or not,” he wrote. “As you know, standard of care antibiotics were not given to the first little girl that died, which lead [sic] directly to her death.”

Bartlett could not be reached for comment; a clinic where he used to work said he was no longer employed there.

Dean Boyer, the funeral director who handled the services for both girls, was present at the dinner where Kennedy met with the Hildebrands and Fehrs. He said he overheard the secretary’s conversations with both sets of parents.

“He never asked pointed questions: Are you vaccinated? Are you not? He just told them how sorry he was,” Boyer told me. “He even met with the kids alone, just sat—a ‘pawpaw minute’ is what I called it.” Boyer praised Kennedy for attempting to keep his visit under wraps. “He tried to get in as quiet as he could, because he didn’t want attention.”

It’s true that Kennedy mostly dodged reporters, but of course his trip was not a secret. After the dinner, he posted a long message on X about the “warmth and love” he felt from the community and about how he had “bonded with many of these resilient, hardworking, resourceful, and God-loving people.” He also shared several photos of himself embracing the families, one with a boy on his knee, another with his arm around Hildebrand. Whereas some of Kennedy’s earlier comments about the outbreak have seemed callous—calling it “not unusual,” for instance, or suggesting without evidence that Kayley Fehr might have been malnourished—these conveyed the image of a government official who cared.

When I spoke with Hildebrand, he said he didn’t know the secretary had posted photos of his family, or that Kennedy had given out Daisy’s full name. He said that he hadn’t wanted “any of this on the internet from the get-go,” but he didn’t blame Kennedy. Instead, he directed his ire at reporters.

“Most of y’all are fake media, and I don’t need my daughter’s name out there to be reported crap on,” he told me. “I just don’t need anybody talking negative about my daughter. She’s in the ground.”