The six-year-old girl hospitalized at Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, Texas, was burning with a fever and having trouble breathing. Doctors quickly put her on a ventilator, inserting a thick tube down the child’s throat so a machine could breathe for her; they put her on IV drips to rehydrate her little body and prescribed antibiotics for any bacterial infections that might have set in during the weeks she spent at home battling measles.
But it was too late. Less than a day after being ventilated, the child went into shock, her blood pressure dropped and she went into cardiac arrest. She could not be resuscitated. Her family and the nation were in mourning: she was the first child to die of measles in the United States in a decade.
Yet some anti-vaccine activists quickly began claiming the girl died of medical malpractice, not measles, revealing a manual they are now using in Pennsylvania amid a growing outbreak — a message echoed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and longtime anti-vaccine activist, as he publicly challenges the rising death toll.
Measles deaths in the United States – numbering eight in less than two years – constitute a political minefield for Kennedy, placing him at the center of a public backlash after years of false claims about the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
The diversion campaign is already having concrete consequences, beyond the growing number of victims. Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group previously led by Kennedy, says it has triggered malpractice investigations into doctors who treated the two unvaccinated girls who died of measles during last year’s outbreak in West Texas, which infected at least 762 people.
“At first, they were going to dismiss the complaints,” Brian Hooker, CHD’s scientific director, announced in a recent video. “But upon further review, they decided that they were going to let their own medical expert review the records of these particular deaths. Because in each case, inappropriate antibiotics were prescribed, and that, I believe, led to the deaths of both girls.”
Paul Offit, an infectious disease pediatrician and internationally renowned vaccine expert, said “it’s not a good idea” for Kennedy and other anti-vaxxers that so many cases and deaths are rising. “So they try to say, ‘Well, it wasn’t measles.'”
Katherine Wells, director of Lubbock Public Health, agrees. “It’s their playbook,” she said. “It’s just another tactic on their part to disrupt or question vaccines and their safety. The problem is we have these big measles outbreaks, and they don’t stop.”
It’s not just deaths, but also serious illnesses, Wells said. “Massive” outbreaks affect “families and communities and disrupt lives,” Wells said. About one in five unvaccinated measles patients is hospitalized. Measles suppresses immunity to all other diseases for years, exposing patients to other serious infections. And survivors can, years later, develop serious measles-related complications, such as subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), which is fatal and incurable.
Last year, Hooker traveled to Texas to interview the parents of the deceased six-year-old, who said they still would not vaccinate their children. A second child, aged eight, quickly died of measles in the same hospital.
Hooker asked to see the children’s medical records, and he shared them with Pierre Kory, an intensive care doctor with no training in pediatrics who lost his certifications for promoting Covid misinformation, heavily promoted the antiparasitic ivermectin as a treatment for Covid, and claimed that polio paralysis is not caused by the virus but by pesticides. Kory, who himself escaped legal liability in a malpractice lawsuit brought by the estate of a Covid patient who died following his treatment plan, concluded that the measles deaths were actually the result of medical error.
Kory claimed the first child was prescribed “a totally inappropriate antibiotic” for a bacterial infection she developed from measles, adding that “she did not die of measles, far from it, but rather of pneumonia and medical mismanagement.” He also attributed the second child’s death to “medical malpractice” due to his antibiotic treatment. Secondary bacterial infections are very common with measles, which can create a cascade of life-threatening complications.
Privately, Kory reportedly said he suspected the two deaths of young girls in Texas were caused by a weaponized version of measles.
Hooker and a colleague both filed complaints with the Texas Medical Board, alleging that the antibiotics were inappropriately administered to sick children. In the video, he said the medical board was looking into the complaints. The Guardian and Important Context were unable to confirm Hooker’s claims. The identities of the doctors are not public.
Anyone can file a complaint with a state medical board, and boards take complaints seriously. Several anti-vaccine figures have received complaints from the medical commission regarding their own conduct.
“The doctors went above and beyond, and the hospitals went above and beyond,” Wells said. Hospital pediatricians work with the sickest children, with high stress and relatively low pay. “It’s so difficult to be told that either you wanted to harm them or you didn’t want to give them the best care possible,” Wells said. Now, with the CHD accusations and possible medical board reports, “I think it’s on everyone’s mind,” she said.
Hooker’s remarks on the Texas complaints followed the measles deaths of two unvaccinated infants in Pennsylvania. Hooker pledged to “put troops on the ground” in the state to “make sure that if this was a hospital error, it doesn’t happen again.”
Other anti-vaccine activists are helping to fuel the discourse. Peter McCullough, a former cardiologist whose certification was revoked by the American Board of Internal Medicine, noted on Still, the county coroner said the woman was unable to seek health care before her situation deteriorated, and so would not have received medication for her illness.
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Kennedy suggested that Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro made up the measles deaths for political reasons. That message was echoed by Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, who said in a Fox News interview that Shapiro was “putting this on the airwaves for political purposes, just like what happened during COVID,” adding, “And that’s why there’s such distrust in public health.”
Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in an interview with Fox Business: “We don’t know if the children died of measles or if they had another disease that was already attacking them and if they got measles at the same time. » The CDC has also questioned these deaths, listing only two of the five deaths that have occurred this year in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania officials have made it clear that these deaths were due to measles.
Anti-vaccinators have long vilified and targeted doctors. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton opened an investigation into doctors who vaccinate children, alleging a conspiracy with pharmaceutical companies. And CHD has funded numerous lawsuits against pediatricians for alleged vaccine side effects. In January, the group filed Rico’s lawsuit against the American Academy of Pediatrics, which had sued Kennedy over changes to the vaccination schedule.
Although he no longer runs CHD, Kennedy still appears to have close ties to the organization. At their conference in Washington DC in September, he said they had “a friend in the White House”.
Advocates say the group appears to be intervening in Kennedy’s favor amid a continued resurgence of measles, which had already been declared eliminated in the United States but has made a comeback amid growing anti-vaccine sentiment. CHD and Kennedy have been the main promoters of vaccine misinformation, according to a 2021 report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
Kennedy was “a very effective anti-vaccine campaigner,” leading to the largest measles outbreak in three decades as well as the resurgence of other preventable diseases, Offit said. “Today we have more children dying from the flu, measles and whooping cough – and Haemophilus influenzae Type B meningitis is reappearing.
Anti-vaccine activists want to “distract, distract, distract” from the damage they have caused, Offit said. He believes this tactic will not succeed, pointing to resistance from leaders, including Shapiro, and pediatricians. “I think pediatricians will continue to move forward as they have,” Offit said. When Kennedy tried to drastically scale back vaccine recommendations in January, “pediatricians ignored him,” Offit said. “I think most people don’t know that.”
Efforts to spread misinformation and distrust of pediatricians could have harmful consequences, especially for people who already doubt vaccines, Wells said. “It only divides us further. It sticks with people who want to believe this narrative, and I think it adds to the doubt that they have.”
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Gn Health
