In a sweeping interview, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, described a strategy for the retention of the measles epidemic in western Texas, which was removed from the prevailing science, largely based on marginal theories of prevention and prevention.
He gave a storm call for vaccinations to the affected community, but said the choice was personal. He suggested that measles vaccines were more common than known, as opposed to extensive research.
He claimed that natural immunity to measles, which was acquired through infection, is also somehow protected by cancer and heart disease, a claim not supported by research.
He called for controversial treatments such as the garden liver oil and said that local doctors had achieved “almost miraculous and instant” recovery with steroids or antibiotics.
The deterioration of the measles epidemic, which has largely spread through a Mennonite community in Gaines County, has infected about 200 people and killed a child, the first such death in the United States in 10 years.
Another suspicious death of measles has been reported in New Mexico, where cases have recently increased in a county bordering Gaines county.
The interview, which lasted 35 minutes, was published online by Fox News last week, shortly before President Trump’s address in Congress. The departments were posted earlier, but the full version received a little attention.
Mr Kennedy offered conflicting public health messages as he tried to reconcile the long -term ratification of the government’s vaccines with his own skepticism of decades.
Vaccines are “recommended” for West Texans, but immunization risks have been underestimated, he said.
Mr Kennedy acknowledged that vaccines “prevent infection” and said the federal government was helping to ensure that people had access to “good medicines, including those who want them, to vaccines”.
“In extremely non -vaccinated communities like Mennonites, it’s something we recommend,” he said.
Mr Kennedy described the vaccination as a personal choice that must be respected, then continued to raise scary concerns about vaccine safety.
He said he had said that a dozen children of Mennonite were injured by vaccines in Gaines County. People in the community wanted federal health workers to reach Texas “to also examine our children who had been vaccine and look at them in Mati,” Mr Kennedy said.
However, the MMR vaccine itself has been thoroughly studied and is safe. There is no link to autism, as the secretary claims in the past. While all vaccines have casual side effects, the health officer worldwide concluded that the benefits far exceed the very low vaccination risks.
Mr Kennedy argued differently: “We do not know what the risk profile for these products is. We need to restore government confidence. And we will do so by saying the truth and by strict science to understand both security and efficiency issues.”
Responding to questions about Mr Kennedy’s position on vaccination, a spokesman for health and human services pointed out a recent piece of opinion in which he wrote that the plans prevented children from assigning measles and protected people who could not be vaccinated.
“However, he believes that” the decision to vaccinate is personal, “the spokesman said, referring to Mr Kennedy’s opinion article.
Mr Kennedy claimed that it was “very difficult” for measles to kill a healthy person and that malnutrition played a role in the Texas epidemic.
At the beginning of the interview, Mr Kennedy recognized the severity of measles infection, noting that it could lead to death, brain edema and pneumonia.
But he also described the disease as rarely deadly, even before 1963, when the vaccine became available. He said measles has a “very low mortality rate from infection”.
According to diseases and prevention centers, for every thousand people infected with measles in the United States, the virus kills one to three. One study estimates that without vaccination today there would be 400,000 hospitalizations and 1,800 deaths per year.
Death is not the only possible consequence. Measles can also cause permanent blindness, deafness and mental disability. Before the vaccine is available, about a thousand people each year had encephalitis due to the virus.
In later comments, Mr Kennedy suggested that serious symptoms mainly affected people who were unhealthy before the measles.
“It is very difficult for measles to kill a healthy person,” he said, later adding that “we see a correlation between people who are injured by measles and people who do not have good nutrition or who do not have good exercise.”
West Texas is a “type of food desert”, he added. Malnutrition “may have been an issue” for the child who died of measles in Gaines County.
Texas health officials said the child had no “known underlying conditions”.
Dr. Wendell Parkey, a doctor in Gaines county with many patients with Mennonite, said the idea that the community was malnourished was wrong.
Mennonites often avoid processed foods, increase their own animals and make their own bread, he noted. From a very young age, many members of the community also help agriculture and other natural demanding jobs.
“They are the healthiest people here,” he said. “Nutrition. I would put them against anyone.”
There is evidence that seriously malnourished children in poor countries often suffer worse results than measles, said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chairman of the Infectious Diseases Committee at the American Academy of Pediatrics.
But there is no reliable evidence that poor eating habits and exercise routines make a child more prone to measles complications, he added.
There is also plenty of evidence that measles usually killed healthy children before the MMR vaccine, said Patsy Stinchfield, a immediate previous president of the National Foundation for infectious diseases.
Before 1963, about 500 children, many of the previously healthy, died from the virus every year, he said. About 40 % of people infected last year were hospitalized, according to CDC
In the interview, Mr Kennedy seemed frustrated that a disease imposed by vaccines rather than chronic illness had drawn national attention during his first weeks as secretary.
“We had two measles deaths in 20 years in this country – we have 100,000 autism diagnoses each year,” he said. “We have to watch the ball. Chronic illness is our enemy.”
The proposal that vaccines cause autism has been discouraged by dozens of scientific studies. Scientists have pointed out that measles deaths are so annoying because they can be prevented by vaccination.
“Natural immunity” after infection can protect the body from various chronic diseases, the secretary said.
Asked if he was opposed to so-called measles-banota parties that parents deliberately hold measles from a sick child to healthy children-Mr Kennedy said that “he will never advise anyone to get sick”.
But it also praised the benefits of natural immunity, the protection obtained after it was infected with a virus, claiming that it lasted longer than the vaccine -induced immunity and could later protect against cancers and heart disease.
While it is true that a measles infection can provide lifelong protection from the virus, the risks are getting too ill exceeding any little immunity benefit, Dr. O’Leary said.
Two doses of the MMR vaccine are about 97 % effective in preventing infection. Even if a vaccinated person gets a significant infection, the disease tends to be mild.
Experts also said there is no reliable evidence to support the claim that an measles infection protects against other diseases.
Just the opposite: a measles infection can cause “immune amnesia”, in which the body “forgets” how to defend itself against the diseases in which it has already been exposed, making it the most sensitive to future infections.
Mr Kennedy spoke enthusiastically about the unproved treatments for measles and said that HHS would study them.
Mr Kennedy said the Ministry of Health and Human Services would conduct clinical trials in various unproved measles treatments, including a steroid, Vudsonide. an antibiotic called clarithromycin. and Gadu liver oil, which said it was “the safest application of vitamin A.”
Mr Kennedy said he had heard from two local doctors that these treatments had led to a “miraculous and instant recovery”.
“We have to do a really good job to talk to the front -line doctors and see what works on the ground,” he said. “These therapeutics have been really ignored by the organization for a long time.”
While doctors sometimes administer high doses of vitamin A to take care of children with severe measles, providing it through a dietary supplement such as the liver oil makes it difficult to grant expensive amounts, said Dr. William Schaffner, Specialist infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
There are no reliable data indicating that the garden liver oil is “In every way probably safer” than traditionally given vitamin A, he added.
Dr. Schaffner said that antibiotics, which fight bacterial infections, are not effective treatments for measles, a virus. And he did not know any evidence that the steroids improved the results for measles children.
Conducting clinical trials of these treatments is difficult at practical – there are not enough children with measles in the United States to conduct a large test. And such a study would be morally full: Doctors may need to withhold standard supporting care, such as vitamin A, in order to test these corrective measures.
Mr Kennedy’s focus on unpaid treatments has frustrated some doctors in Gaines county who are trying to explain to patients that there is no antiviral for measles and that they have little control over which patients suffer severe symptoms.
“We already have to do with people who believe that measles is not a big deal,” said Dr. Leila Myrick, a family medicine doctor in Seminole, Texas, who has taken care of patients with measles for several weeks.
“Now they will believe that they can get this miracle treatment and that they certainly do not need to be vaccinated. It’s a 100 percent that will make it more difficult.”
