During his Senate confirmation hearings, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to downplay his decades-long reputation as an opponent of vaccines. He even persuaded a Republican physician, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, that he would be guided by science, not his ideology. Why Senators believe nominees who try to disown their past is a mystery.

Dr. Paul Offit is a pediatrician who specializes in communicable diseases, vaccine research, and immunology. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. In this piece, he chastises RFK Jr. for his indifference to the death of a child because of his failure to get vaccinated.

On February 26, 2025, a school-aged child in West Texas died from measles. This marked the first child death in the US from the disease since 2003. The death was part of a larger outbreak in this Mennonite community that included 146 people, 20 of whom were hospitalized. The outbreak wasn’t an isolated event. Additional cases of measles had been reported in Alaska, California, Georgia, Kentucky, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York City, and Rhode Island. Measles is a winter-spring disease. We still have at least three months to go before the end of a typical measles season.

At a White House meeting on February 27th, the newly installed Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., responded to the events in Texas. Failing to immediately acknowledge the tragedy of a preventable death, he said that “measles outbreaks are not unusual” and that they happen every year. In truth, measles had been eliminated from the United States by 2000. At that time, due to a high level of population immunity, the virus wasn’t transmitted from one American child to another even after people with measles from other countries entered the United States. Unfortunately, owing to unfounded fears about measles vaccine safety, a critical percentage of parents have now chosen not to vaccinate their children, dropping immunization rates below the level required for herd immunity.

RFK Jr. also tried to dismiss the nearly two dozen hospitalizations in West Texas by claiming that they were “mainly for quarantine,” when in fact children were hospitalized for severe measles pneumonia. RFK Jr. apparently doesn’t understand that children exposed to measles are quarantined at home, not in the hospital. Indeed, the last place you would want to quarantine a child would be in a hospital filled with a vulnerable population of children, many of whom are particularly susceptible to the disease.

RFK Jr.’s dismissal of the Texas outbreak as “nothing to see here” was even more disheartening in that perhaps no one has contributed more to the perception that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine is dangerous than him. For 20 years, he and his organization, Children’s Health Defense, has claimed that the MMR vaccine causes autismdespite studies showing that it doesn’t.

The West Texas measles outbreak wasn’t RFK Jr.’s first experience with a Mennonite community. On July 31, 2021, in the middle of the Covid pandemic, RFK Jr. stood in front of 1,500 people in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, home to one of the largest Mennonite communities in the United States, and talked about his experiences with measles as a child. The transcript from his talk later surfaced:

He said that “the cure for measles is chicken soup and vitamin A.” In other words, measles is no big deal. Two years earlier, RFK Jr. had traveled to Samoa before an outbreak of measles that had caused 5,600 cases and 83 deaths, mostly in children less than four years old. Despite this experience, he was still capable of dismissing the disease as a trivial, harmless infection of children.

RFK Jr.’s comments at the White House the day after the measles death were most remarkable for what he didn’t say. He didn’t say that the death was especially tragic because it was entirely preventable. And he didn’t say loudly and clearly that under-vaccinated communities in the United States needed to get vaccinated to avoid a similar tragedy. And that they needed to do it soon. This wasn’t surprising. For RFK Jr. to have spoken forcefully about the importance of vaccines in the face of a growing epidemic would have gone against everything that he had said and done for the last 20 years.

Anti-vaccine activists don’t change their stripes. Even when they’re given the enormous responsibility of protecting the nation’s children.