Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in an interview with CBS News that people should receive the measles vaccine because “it does limit the spread.”
“We encourage people to get the measles vaccine,” he said, although he emphasized that the “government should not be mandating those.”
Kennedy explained that he is “not going to take people’s vaccines away,” but instead “make sure that we have good science so that people can make an informed choice.”
Describing the reported deaths of children from measles, Kennedy explained that the “child whose funeral I attended this week was hospitalized three times from other illnesses.”
“She got measles and she got over the measles according to her parents,” he said. “I saw the medical report on it today and the thing that killed her was not the measles, but it was a bacteriological infection.”
In an opinion piece for Fox News published last month, Kennedy wrote that the Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for ” providing up-to-date guidance on available therapeutic medications,” for measles, noting that vitamin A can reduce its mortality.
“Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons,” he wrote, going on to explain that sanitation and nutrition improvements have “eliminated 98% of measles deaths.”
In another segment of his interview with CBS News, Kennedy stated that food dyes will be removed from products “within two years.”
Food dyes are “clearly associated with a variety a grim inventory of diseases, including cancers and behavioral disease and neurological disease like ADHD,” he said, “and it’s very, very well-documented and they’re making, in many cases, the same products in this country have those dyes, and then they use vegetable dyes in Canada, Mexico and Europe.”
