A member of the press didn’t back down Thursday when an aide to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to end his question.
Kennedy joined Rep. Jennifer Kiggans (R-Va.) in Virginia Beach for a roundtable discussion on addressing health care workforce shortages, and at the end of the news conference, the reporter asked him about recent measles deaths in Pennsylvania.
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“Do you believe there are five deaths, potentially six, from measles in the state of Pennsylvania―” the reporter began to ask.
“We’re not going to talk about measles either,” the aide said, cutting the reporter off.
The journalist responded by pointing out a simple fact: “He’s the highest-ranking health official in the country! He can answer that question! He’s a cabinet secretary!”
Kennedy then began to respond, but not before first pointing.
“We have done better. We are currently facing a global measles epidemic,” Kennedy said. “It’s all over the world, and the measles outbreak is happening because so many people haven’t been vaccinated during the COVID pandemic, and that’s something that Anthony Fauci actually predicted.”
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He continued: “(Fauci) said, ‘We’re going to kill more people from measles than we save from COVID’ as we shut down measles vaccination programs.”
Kennedy’s remarks reference a private journal article written by Fauci on May 6, 2020, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The entry was then discussed at a congressional hearing over the summer.
“More than a million children worldwide have not been vaccinated against measles due to the shutdown,” Fauci wrote. “This is terrible and needs to be addressed, because on this basis alone there would be far more deaths from measles among children than deaths from coronavirus among children.”
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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during an announcement at Health and Human Services (HHS) headquarters in Washington, DC, Monday, October 5, 2026. Bloomberg via Getty Images
Kennedy went on to say that the United States has “done better, and in particular my administration, has done better in controlling the epidemic than any other country in the world.”
After releasing some statistics, he then decided to blame Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) for the state’s outbreak, accusing him of withholding Epi-Aid from the CDC because “they didn’t want help from the Trump administration.”
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Kennedy said the state has finally requested help from the federal government and hopes to be able to “put an end to this epidemic quickly.”
Last month, Trump and Kennedy blamed the outbreak in Pennsylvania on Shapiro.
“They have a bad governor in Pennsylvania. People just don’t know it. He’s very, almost incompetent,” Trump said at the time, with Kennedy agreeing.
Shapiro responded by lambasting the president and Kennedy in a post on X.
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“Incompetence lies in allowing measles, a disease declared eliminated in 2000, to resurface,” Shapiro wrote.
“Incompetence means spending your time promoting pure lies instead of urging people to get the vaccine that would protect them against this deadly disease,” added the Democratic lawmaker.
“Incompetence amounts to denying the tragedy of four deaths associated with measles in Pennsylvania,” Shapiro continued. “Incompetence is right behind you, Mr. President.”
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