Examining RFK Jr.’s Role in the Measles Outbreak

Measles cases have reached a 35-year high while Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s most prominent vaccine skeptic, is leading the Department of Health and Human Services, raising questions about what role he has played in the outbreak.

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Before the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963, the U.S. experienced millions of cases per year. Children who came down with the disease were often left with lifelong ailments and hundreds of American kids died every year. Cases steadily declined throughout the rest of the century, then tumbled in the 1990s when a second dose of the vaccine was recommended. By 2000, measles was declared eradicated.

But now, that longstanding trend is reversing: In Kennedy’s first year as HHS secretary, measles cases reached their highest point since 1991 and are only getting worse. As of August 6, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that there have been 2,465 reported cases of measles across the U.S. this year. This exceeds the 2,289 cases reported from January to December of 2025. In 2024, only 285 cases were reported, and there were only 59 in 2023. The outbreak is largely confined to Americans who haven’t received the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, with 93 percent cases appearing in unvaccinated individuals, according to the CDC.

Setting aside Kennedy’s long history of maligning vaccines as potentially dangerous, Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, argues that Kennedy hasn’t done enough as HHS secretary to encourage vaccination.

“He’s the number one public health official in this country. . . . He should hold a press conference every day, looking at the camera and saying, ‘Please vaccinate your children,’” Offit told National Review. “This is a preventable disease. The fact that children are once again dying in the United States is unconscionable.”

Kennedy has held press conferences to discuss issues ranging from advances in nutrition and medical education to fighting health-care fraud and autism, but he has not held a conference exclusively, or even in large part, on the U.S. measles outbreak.

“We don’t wait two years to react to a measles epidemic and we should not for any kind of infectious disease — we shouldn’t have to do that for diabetes or autism,” Kennedy said during an April 16, 2025, press conference about a new chronic disease division under MAHA. This was the extent of his discussion of measles during the conference, despite the 800 measles cases reported in the U.S. between January 1 and April 17, 2025.

Most of his discussion of the outbreak has occurred within media interviews.

When asked about the outbreak in March 2025 by Fox News host Sean Hannity, Kennedy said the MMR vaccine wears off over time, leaving many older Americans “essentially unvaccinated.” He said he grew up at a time when everybody came down with the measles and received “lifetime protection against measles infection” through active natural immunity, and the vaccine doesn’t do that. The vaccine, Kennedy said, “does not appear to provide maternal immunity;” he added, “it used to be that very young kids were protected by breast milk.”

Kennedy neglected to mention that in the days before widespread vaccination, when 95 percent of American children contracted measles by the age of 15, some 400 to 500 Americans died from the disease every year and nearly 50,000 were hospitalized due to complications from the disease, according to the CDC. Measles also causes swelling of the brain, which can result in a spate of long-term neurological problems such as seizures, vision loss, and cognitive decline.

During an interview aired on CBS News in April 2025, Kennedy was specifically asked about the two measles deaths reported up to that point in the U.S.

“You know what, we do a pretty good job — we do a very good job — at controlling the measles in this country,” Kennedy said, “and although the numbers of measles cases are now around 640, those numbers will continue to grow because you’re adding old cases to new cases and there’s a long incubation period of ten to 14 days, so you don’t know who’s out there spreading.”

“The rate of increase has substantially decreased so we are successfully controlling it,” he added, comparing the U.S. death rate from measles to the 37 deaths he said Europe had reported.

But when asked why the world is facing measles again today, he said that “we’re always going to have measles no matter what happens as the vaccine wanes very quickly.” A study published in The Lancet found that MMR vaccine efficacy wanes slowly over time, leading to a relatively small percentage of cases emerging in individuals who had received two doses of the vaccine.

When pressed, Kennedy conceded that vaccination does play a role in prevention but emphasized that individuals should evaluate the existing evidence and make their own decisions. “What I’m going to do is make sure that we have good science so people can make an informed choice,” he said.

William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine, health policy, and the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said that the Trump administration’s messaging has “been disturbing” when it comes to vaccination.

“I will say that the messaging, nationally, has been confusing,” he told NR. “It has caused more questions, more anxiety among parents.” He said his colleagues working as pediatricians have always fielded a lot of questions about vaccines, but the past three years have been unlike any others.

But as William Moss, a Johns Hopkins professor of epidemiology, international health, and molecular microbiology and immunology and executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center, points out, a significant portion of measles cases are emerging in children who should have been vaccinated long before Kennedy took on an influential role in the federal government.

“The fact that such a high proportion of cases are in individuals older than 5 years of age indicates that residents of these communities have long chosen not to be vaccinated against measles,” he added. “Low vaccination coverage has been fueled by misinformation and disinformation, and accelerated by increasing distrust during the COVID pandemic, but is of longer duration.”

However, Kennedy has long encouraged vaccine skepticism as a private citizen.

Jennifer Horney, professor and founding chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Delaware, told NR that vaccination rates “have been dropping for some time, with measles vaccination nationally falling from 95 percent [among kindergarteners in 2019] to 92 percent” by 2023. She said some communities, like the West Texas town where the measles outbreak began, had vaccination rates closer to 80 percent, well below the 95 percent required for herd immunity.

Vaccine hesitancy increased further during and after the COVID pandemic, when attempts to compel vaccination combined with misleading claims about the vaccine’s impact turned off large swaths of the population. Additionally, because of lockdowns, many children missed regular check-ups during the pandemic, where they would have otherwise received their MMR vaccination.

Kennedy acknowledges that low vaccination rates are causing the outbreak, but argues that these “pandemic-related disruptions” are to blame.

“Current outbreaks reflect vaccination trends that developed over many years before Secretary Kennedy took office,” HHS told NR in a statement. “Childhood vaccination coverage declined during the COVID-19 pandemic as routine care was disrupted and public confidence declined.”

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During an August 2 interview on CNN, anchor Dana Bash asked RFK Jr. if he accepted “some responsibility” considering the severity of the outbreak over the past two years.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “This is an international outbreak, and we’re doing better at handling it than any country in the world.”

He said the COVID-19 lockdown was the primary cause of the measles outbreak.

“[C]hildren during that period did not get vaccinated,” Kennedy said. “[Fauci] says in his diaries more children are going to die from measles because of these lockdowns than COVID.”

Fauci wrote about this in his May 6, 2020, . He said he had spoken with then–CDC Director Robert Redfield the day before regarding “the fact that >1 million children world-wide have missed their measles vaccinations because of the shutdown.”

“This is terrible and needs to be addressed,” Fauci wrote, “since on that basis alone, there would be far, far more excess deaths from measles among children than coronavirus deaths among children.”

Numerous epidemiologists confirmed that the pandemic adversely affected vaccination rates.

Horney believes skepticism toward vaccines and public health as a whole is “not new” but argues that social-media driven “misinformation” spread what used to be a more niche way of thinking to the broader population.

“Research conducted in the United Kingdom and the U.S. during the pandemic showed that exposure to misinformation was associated with reduced adherence to public health recommendations, lower vaccination intentions, increased endorsement of ineffective treatments, and diminished trust in public institutions,” she told NR.

Kennedy says the majority of measles cases are in religious communities like those of Mennonites who do not — and never have — vaccinated. “It’s hard to blame that on me,” he added.

Pennsylvania, the state often cited as having the largest Mennonite and Amish populations in the U.S., has had one of the highest reported counts of measles cases. However, states like Ohio and Indiana that also have large Mennonite and Amish communities have some of the fewest reported cases of measles nationwide.

Kennedy still insists that there is a proven link between vaccines and autism, and he has never stated outright that the MMR vaccine won’t cause autism. But he did say that the MMR vaccine is the “only one that has been studied” and told CNN he promotes it.

“Secretary Kennedy has been clear that vaccination remains the most effective way to prevent measles infection. CDC’s recommendation for two doses of the MMR vaccine has remained consistent since the 1990s and has not changed under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership,” HHS told NR in a statement. “Under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, HHS has mounted an aggressive outbreak response, providing more than $8.5 million to states and local partners, expanding technical assistance, and surging CDC personnel and resources to support containment efforts where needed most.”

Americans have, to some degree, become victims of their own success when it comes to measles: Because vaccination was so successful, most people forgot how devastating the disease can be.

“If you haven’t seen measles and you don’t know anything about it, you may have this notion in your mind that, ‘oh, we heard everybody gets a rash and then gets over it. It’s not a big deal,’” Schaffner told NR. “Measles is an extraordinarily serious infection. Even an uncomplicated case of measles can make a child miserable for a week and a half.” He said 400 to 500 children would die from measles and its complications each year before the vaccine was invented.

The CDC reports that there have been no deaths from measles in 2026, and only 7 percent of the total cases have been hospitalized; however, experts worry about its more serious side effects.

“Among the most common is middle ear infection, which may require antibiotic treatment,” Schaffner told NR. Measles can also cause pneumonia and, in turn, difficulty breathing. Schaffner said this was the foremost cause of hospitalization and pediatric intensive care unit admission.

“About 20 percent of [unvaccinated] people are hospitalized, and one to three children will experience severe swelling around the brain and die from measles,” said Rebecca Sunenshine, Medical Director of the Health Observatory at Arizona State University and a retired captain in the U.S. Public Health Service. She said this is why she vaccinated her child and encourages the rest of her family to vaccinate.

HHS told NR that it has “focused its response where it can have the greatest impact: rapidly supporting affected communities, strengthening state and local response efforts, and communicating the ways in which measles transmission can be slowed, including through MMR vaccination, and ways that measles can be treated.”

Nevertheless, Schaffner believes the messaging on vaccines has been confusing “at the national level.” “Vaccination has, at least in some quarters, acquired a political veneer almost, so that complicates vaccination,” he said. He often tells parents to discuss the vaccine with their pediatrician or family doctor or even to Google “measles” and learn about its effects themselves.

“We need to work to restore the trust in science and the scientific process, which isn’t perfect, but is designed to catch mistakes,” Sunenshine added. “No matter how you feel about the COVID vaccines, we should not forget that childhood immunizations against diseases like measles have been one of the most successful human achievements towards keeping our kids safe and healthy.”

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