In early 2015, the California Department of Public Health identified a case of measles in an 11-year-old who had recently traveled to Disneyland. Within a month, at least 125 US residents were stricken with the disease.
About a third of them had visited the Magic Kingdom theme park, many were unvaccinated, and the outbreak spread to Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, as well as Canada and Mexico. This burst of measles prompted much public discussion about vaccine hesitancy. Yet Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed concern about the outbreak as “hysteria.”
At the time, several state legislatures were considering measures that would limit vaccine exemptions, in many cases ending the ability of parents to skirt immunization requirements for their children by citing a personal belief (as opposed to a medical reason). As one of the most prominent anti-vaxxers in the nation, Kennedy opposed these bills.
With Kennedy now leading the Department of Health and Human Services during a measles outbreak and providing medical advice that public health experts say is misguided (if not dangerous), this past episode reveals his troubling attitude toward measles and vaccines.
In early March 2015, Kennedy traveled to Salem, Oregon, to lobby against one of the state measures that would remove the personal-belief exemption. In a local theater, he screened a film called Trace Amounts that alleged there was a link between mercury in vaccines and autism and that assailed public health officials and researchers as corrupt fraudsters.
But scientific studies had debunked the notion of a link between autism and vaccines. An infamous 1998 study conducted by a British medical researcher named Andrew Wakefield—based on just 12 children—that tied the measles vaccine to autism had been discredited years earlier and retracted by the journal that had published it.
Still, Kennedy continued to push this claim. At the Salem event, before a small audience of Oregon state lawmakers, legislative staffers, and vaccine opponents, he declared vaccines were causing autism in children. He pressed the legislators to reject the bill.
Kennedy was accompanied by Brian Hooker, another anti-vax proponent. Hooker had published a paper claiming there was a connection between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism among young Black boys, and he had asserted the Centers for Disease Control was covering this up. But in October 2014, five months before this screening, the journal that had published his article retracted it, noting a “post-publication peer review raised concerns about the validity of the methods and statistical analysis” used by Hooker.
