RFK Jr. Not Concerned About First Measles Death In 10 Years. Hey, People Die, You Know?
Plus ebola and TB and whatnot. It's all fine!
On Wednesday, an unvaccinated child in Texas became the first person to die from measles since 2015. Texas health officials released few details about the case except that the child had been hospitalized in Lubbock. According to the state Department of State Health Services, the measles outbreak is now up to 124 confirmed cases, most of them involving children aged between five and 17. So far, 18 people have been hospitalized, a number the health department warns is likely to rise. Next door in New Mexico, another nine cases have been confirmed in one county.
At the president’s first Cabinet meeting at the White House, which Donald Trump was also allowed to attend, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. impressed the nation with his ability to blithely downplay a health disaster and lie about it a some, too, a key skill for members of the Musk Cabinet.
Here’s video from NBC News, featuring a jobless man suggesting that Kennedy would be happy to take questions about the outbreak.
Kennedy Jr. said several things, like “We are following the measles epidemic every day,” which could be true, although his grasp of the details was, to say the least, iffy. He correctly got the number of confirmed cases at 124, but bizarrely said, almost blasé about it, that there had been two deaths, not one. He said there were about 20 people hospitalized, but lied about why, saying that was “mainly for quarantine,” which is emphatically not the case. In fact, here is a top Lubbock doctor explaining, emphatically, that they were hospitalized because they had trouble breathing.
“We don’t hospitalize patients for quarantine purposes,” said Dr. Lara Johnson, the chief medical officer of Covenant Health Lubbock Service Area. “Quarantine is not something that would happen in a healthcare facility. We admit patients who need acute supportive treatment in our hospital.”
“Patients have been needing supplemental oxygen and respiratory support to help them get over viral pneumonia linked to the measles,” Johnson told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta last week.
None of the kids who have been hospitalized were vaccinated against measles.
And while the Texas health department urges members of the public to get themselves and their kids vaccinated as the best way to avoid measles, Kennedy Jr. didn’t mention the measles vaccine even once while speaking to reporters. Nobody asked, anyway.
But he did take the chance to downplay the child’s death by suggesting that it’s all nothing, because “Incidentally, there have been four measles outbreaks this year. In this country last year there were 16. So, it’s not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year.” Yes, a death from measles is pretty fucking unusual; a child hasn’t died here from it in the past decade. Maybe Kennedy meant we should get used to this being the norm going forward. Good luck!
In addition to the big outbreak in Texas, measles cases have been confirmed across the US, in New Jersey, Tennessee, Washington, and elsewhere. In Los Angeles, the LA County Public Health Department announced this week that measles had been confirmed in an infant who had traveled to Korea and returned to LA International Airport on February 19, and warned travelers who had been in the International arrivals terminal between 1:00 and 4:00 PM that day that they may be at high risk of infection. The Daily Mail tabloid, glossing over the fact that this happened well over a week ago, helpfully headlined its story “LAX on red alert as foreign traveler brings in deadly disease and infects unknown number,” so that was definitely the best way to put that.
Ebola? I Hardly Know ‘Er!
There was even more excellent health news during the president’s Cabinet meeting, too. The Chief Executive — of Tesla and SpaceX, at least — offered an amusing anecdote about how he and the kids had “accidentally canceled” USAID’s work to prevent Ebola from spreading in Africa, oopsies! But then it was all OK, because “when we make a mistake, we’ll fix it very quickly,” and he decided — ha ha, silly Elon! — that would be something you people would want, “So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately. And there was no interruption.” Well thank goodness, except as Dan Diamond reports at the Washington Post (archive link),
Yet current and former USAID officials said that Musk was wrong: USAID’s Ebola prevention efforts have been largely halted since Musk and his DOGE allies moved last month to gut the global-assistance agency and freeze its outgoing payments, they said. The teams and contractors that would be deployed to fight an Ebola outbreak have been dismantled, they added. While the Trump administration issued a waiver to allow USAID to respond to an Ebola outbreak in Uganda last month, partner organizations were not promptly paid for their work, and USAID’s own efforts were sharply curtailed compared to past efforts to fight Ebola outbreaks.
And as it turns out, a few hours after Musk’s jolly announcement that everything was fine with Ebola prevention, USAID also told UNICEF and other organizations partnering with the US on such efforts that their contracts had been canceled, too bad, hope everything works out, good luck!
Don’t Forget Flu Vaccines, Although We Guess The FDA Did
The plain old flu continues to be plenty deadly, so if you haven’t had a flu shot this year, you should get that taken care of right away. Since the start of flu season October 1, the Centers for Disease Control estimates that there have been at least 19,000 deaths from influenza, which should be more motivating than it is. Human brains are weird.
And with the new crew of anti-vaxxers in charge at Health and Human Services, it’s particularly disturbing to learn this week that experts on the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine panel were told this week that their scheduled March 13 meeting to plan next year’s flu vaccine was canceled (New York Times gift link). Don’t be silly, of course no reason was given. A similar meeting last week at the CDC was also cancelled.
One committee member, Dr. Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, an outspoken critic of Mr. Kennedy, confirmed the cancellation and warned that it could interfere with or delay production of flu vaccines.
“It’s a six-month production cycle,” Dr. Offit said. “So one can only assume that we’re not picking flu strains this year.”
Every year, the panel meets to discuss evidence on what flu strains are most likely to be prevalent in the coming flu season, so the vaccine will be more likely to provide wide protection. Because there are so many flu strains in nature, the vaccine may not prevent all infections, but it has a good record of protecting against serious illness, hospitalizations, and deaths.
The cancellations have experts worried that this fuckery reflects RFK Jr.’s belief that vaccines are worse than deadly diseases and that the pharmaceutical industry has “captured” the US public health system just to sell vaccines. Sounds like it to us, too.
Kennedy Jr. has in particular attacked Dr. Offitt, who created a vaccine against rotavirus that was adopted by Merck and approved for use in 2006, which obviously means Offitt just wants to roll around in big vaccine money, not to prevent disease.
This is because Kennedy Jr. is an asshole.
The Times point out, however, that the vaccine was approved “before Dr. Offit served on the F.D.A. advisory panel. Dr. Offit’s research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, not the drug company; his hospital, which owned the patent on the vaccine, licensed the patent to Merck.”
It’s not clear what effect the meeting cancellations will have on next year’s flu vaccines; the CDC and FDA recommendations are usually made in March, and are based on flu data from the World Health Organization. Oh, but Trump also cancelled US membership in WHO because rightwingers think it’s too friendly to China and Anthony Fauci (SAME THING!!!!), so perhaps this year the vaccine strains will have to be chosen with a dart board. If the CDC doesn’t make a recommendation in June as to whether to recommend a flu vaccine, that could also fuck over authorization for insurance and government coverage for shots. Again, good luck!
Funding Also Eliminated For Tuberculosis, Polio, Malaria, HIV, And Nutrition Programs. Good Luck!
On top of everything else, The New York Times also reports (gift link) that funding was abruptly terminated Wednesday for a huge range of international health efforts, because America First and if the rest of the world doesn’t want pandemics, the rest of the world can pay to prevent them, we’re done, losers. The Times reports that
a wave of emails went out from the State Department in Washington around the world, landing in inboxes for refugee camps, tuberculosis clinics, polio vaccination projects and thousands of other organizations that received crucial funding from the United States for lifesaving work.
“This award is being terminated for convenience and the interest of the U.S. government,” they began.
Guess that “review” of USAID funding for nutrition programs and serious disease prevention is complete, then. Many of the 5,800 projects that received the emails were among those that supposedly received a “waiver” from the budget freeze weeks ago, although in reality the funding was never actually restored.
“People will die,” said Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center, “but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut.”
Among the projects that had their funding yanked are polio vaccinations, HIV/AIDS prevention, the biggest efforts to control malaria in Africa, shelters for victims of domestic violence, and water treatment for people in refugee camps. Oh, hey, Elon, funding was even eliminated for an Ebola tracking project in Uganda.
It’s pretty horrifying, but we assume the rationale is that the cuts will only affect people in shithole countries, and the US doesn’t have to worry because if there’s an outbreak, maybe we can ban all travel and everything will be just fine.
Good luck!
[CNN / WaPo (archived link) / ABC 7 / NYT (gift link) / NYT (gift link)]
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You understand, and it is chilling to understand, that they are already, actively, gleefully, killing people? Stopping nutrition to starving people, water projects, HIV, polio vaccination, malaria eradication, and more, they are already killing people. Their malevolence is boundless and wont stop there.
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