To state that RFK Jr. says things that are just plainly wrong is to state the obvious. His waffling claims about the dangers of vaccines are wrong. His various other pet conspiracy theories, such as chemtrails and damage to humans from EMF, are also wrong. The data HHS is putting out under his leadership about how many measles deaths have occurred this year is also wrong. Hell, at a recent campaign event in Michigan, a state with a large Arab population, Kennedy decided that the best way to stump for Mike Rogers was to claim that none of the Arabs throughout the world produce any science or literature, which is also wrong.
“There’s 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don’t produce science, they don’t win the Nobel Prize, they don’t win the Fields prize, they don’t win the Wolf Prize, they don’t produce literature,” he said.
Arabs have won all those prizes. Peter Hotez, who is a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and specializes in vaccine development and tropical medicine, said his late colleague, Nobel Prize winner Ahmed Zewail, who was Arab and died in 2016, “would disagree” with Kennedy’s comments.
So, not just wrong, but racist in perhaps the stupidest manner possible given his only reason for being in Michigan in the first place.
So let’s rewind the clock back to April, when Kennedy decided to tell the public that this whole measles outbreak thing had nothing to do with him. Rather, the only reason we had the outbreaks to begin with was because of dirty foreigners coming in as immigrants.
But despite Kennedy being the most vocal source of vaccine misinformation, the secretary tried to blame the outbreaks entirely on immigrants who come to the U.S. from countries where measles is not eliminated — framing the issue as a global epidemic rather than a national public health crisis.
“It has nothing to do with me,” he told lawmakers. “If you’re worried about polio and tuberculosis, you should look at the immigration policies in this country. ’Cause the place where it’s occurring are the place[s] where the immigrants are going, because they’re not vaccinated.”
That was wrong too, of course. We knew it at the time, just was we knew that the practice of blaming immigrants for disease outbreaks is such common practice that we could set our watches to it. But now we have actual data on how the measles is spreading in America and that data fully puts the lie to Kennedy’s bigotry.
Most of the meat of the study focuses on very specific instances in which Washington state endured measles infections that were spread specifically from South Carolina earlier this year.
The study in Washington relied heavily on epidemiological data, linking cases among contacts and exposure sites. But also key to the work was whole-genome sequencing, which made clear that cases didn’t just stem from one single introduction of the virus from South Carolina that then spread among Washington residents; instead, it revealed five separate introductions.
“As public health jurisdictions prepare to respond to increased measles importations linked to domestic measles outbreaks, while remaining vigilant for international importations, timely whole-genome sequencing can supplement epidemiologic information to help differentiate distinct importations from local transmission and inform outbreak response,” the authors conclude.
But when you pair that with the data from CDC as to exactly how the infections are spreading, you get both the micro and macro data for how it’s occurring.
Kennedy claims that there is a “global outbreak” and the US is “doing a better job than any country in the world at controlling the measles outbreak.” Both claims are false. Dozens of other countries have lower case rates than the US. While some countries, including neighboring Canada and Mexico, are also seeing large increases in cases, the soaring case tally in the US is not being driven by international imports, but by domestic spread in under-vaccinated communities.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 18 of the country’s 4,588 confirmed measles cases this year were reported among international visitors. Of all the cases, 4,404 (96 percent) are linked to a domestic outbreak.
There can be no doubt that disease is sometimes imported into America from foreign visitors. But the point is that that just isn’t the real problem here. America’s measles problem is a domestic problem, not a matter of immigration. If we had maintained our vaccination rates such that we had herd immunity, we’d be fine.
It’s because of Kennedy’s many, many lies on vaccines that we are not. Don’t let him tell you another lie, that this is all a result of immigrants, to cover up his responsibility.
