MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow dug deep into the past of President Donald Trump’s new health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to expose all the ways he has downplayed—and even seemingly encouraged the spread of—the measles virus in the past.
The report comes amid one of the worst outbreaks of the disease in decades, in Texas, which has already claimed one life. It is the first death in the United States due to measles in more than a decade.
According to Maddow, Kennedy Jr. wrote in 2021 that such outbreaks “have been fabricated to create fear.” He also argued a few years prior that childhood measles may actually be beneficial for those who contract it.
During a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Kennedy downplayed the current measles outbreak in Texas as “not unusual,” despite experts’ statements showing otherwise, and claimed that two people—not one—have died from the virus.
Maddow, after playing a portion of Kennedy’s remarks, began her segment by correcting him.
“It is not two people who have died. It is one person who has died: an unvaccinated, school-aged child. Why he thinks it’s two people who have died and not one, we don’t know,“ she said.
Maddow then addressed Kennedy’s comment that “there are about 20 people hospitalized, mainly for quarantine.”
“The people who are hospitalized are not being ‘hospitalized for quarantine,’ as he described it, which makes it seems like they’re fine, they’re just being kept in a room. No,” she said. “They’ve been hospitalized for respiratory distress and other serious and potentially fatal symptoms of measles, which can kill you and which has already killed a child in this outbreak.”
The MSNBC anchor then brought up Kennedy’s controversial statements about measles from the not-so-distant past.
She first quoted his foreword to a 2021 anti-vaccine book in which Kennedy wrote that “measles outbreaks have been fabricated to create fear that in turn forces government officials to ‘do something.’”
Kennedy also wrote then that readers “will learn that they have been mislead by the pharmaceutical industry and their captured government agency allies into believing that measles is a deadly disease and that measles vaccines are necessary, safe, and effective.”
Maddow then highlighted a 2019 blog post on the website of Kennedy’s misinformation-promoting Children’s Health Defense group.
In the post, titled “A Dozen Facts About Measles That You Won’t Learn From MSPharmedia,” Kennedy wrote, “Having measles in childhood may also reduce the risk of atopic disease, heart disease, Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas and some other cancers.”
Maddow summed things up: “Donald Trump put him in charge of health and human services for the whole country, and that means he’s in charge of taking care of this explosive measles outbreak in west Texas and New Mexico.”
“Good call?” she asked, skeptically. “Safe hands?”
