14 hours Ago By HuffPost
Amid the largest measles outbreak in decades, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading a new effort to find treatments for the infectious disease for Americans who “choose not to vaccinate.
” HHS announced Friday that Kennedy, a prominent spreader of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and propaganda, is directing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to come up with more measles treatments ― even though decades of research have never turned up effective treatments for measles, reinforcing the importance of the highly effective vaccine. “Secretary Kennedy will be enlisting the entire agency to activate a scientific process to treat a host of diseases, including measles, with single or multiple existing drugs in combination with vitamins and other modalities,” HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said in a statement. The directive comes because Kennedy and department officials “recognize that some individuals and communities across the U.
S. may choose not to vaccinate,” Nixon continued. “This effort will involve collaboration with universities nationwide to develop protocols, conduct testing, and pursue approval for new uses of safe and effective therapeutics that meet the highest scientific standards,” Nixon said.
The directive comes as Kennedy ramps up his promotion of a range of unproven treatments for measles, a disease that can cause pneumonia, encephalitis, pregnancy complications, blindness and death. Kennedy has promoted cod liver with vitamin A as a potential miracle cure for measles, but experts say that most of the studies supporting vitamin A as a possible measles treatment were conducted in the 1980s and 1990s insub-Saharan Africa, where a deficiency in that vitamin is far more prevalent. Research on vitamin A’s impact on measles in people without deficiencies remains inconclusive, but with Kennedy’s prompting, some parents in West Texas ― the center of the 900-person measles outbreak ― have given it to their children in high doses.
Doctors in the area say many of those children have been showing signs of liver damage , a side effect of excessive vitamin A intake. And on Monday, Kennedy said HHS was deploying doctors to Texas to treat measles with “aerosolized steroids with budesonide with clarithromycin and others.” Neither budesonide nor clarithromycin is proven to treat measles, and suggesting their use is dangerous, the American Academy of Pediatrics said in a blunt statement last month.
“Promoting medications to treat measles, particularly when those medications are not recommended, suggests that measles is treatable, which it is not. The most important way to combat measles is through prevention with the MMR vaccine,” AAP said. Though Kennedy has encouraged people to get the MMR vaccine ― which is 97% effective at preventing measles in the first place ― he consistently undermines his own advice.
On Wednesday, he baselessly claimed that the measles vaccine “contains a lot of aborted fetus debris and DNA particles.” And in a TV appearance Monday, he told parents to “ do your own research ” on vaccines, echoing a common refrain among anti-vaccine skeptics. Related.
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