US measles deaths reach eight in less than two years
Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization formerly led by Robert F Kennedy Jr, claims it has sparked malpractice investigations into the doctors who treated two young unvaccinated girls who died of measles during last year’s west Texas outbreak. Brian Hooker, the group’s chief scientific officer, said in a recent video that the Texas medical board decided to have a medical expert review the records for those deaths. Hooker said “inappropriate antibiotics were prescribed, and that, I believe, led to both girls’ deaths.”
The first of the two deaths occurred at a children’s hospital in Lubbock, Texas. A six-year-old girl arrived burning with fever and struggling to breathe; doctors placed her on a ventilator, gave her IV fluids, and prescribed antibiotics for bacterial infections that may have taken hold during the weeks she spent at home battling measles. Within a day of being ventilated, she went into shock, her blood pressure crashed, and she went into cardiac arrest. She could not be resuscitated, becoming the first child to die of measles in the US in a decade. A second child, aged eight, soon died at the same hospital. The west Texas outbreak infected at least 762 people.
US measles deaths now number eight in less than two years. The toll has centered Kennedy — the US Department of Health and Human Services secretary and a longtime anti-vaccine activist — in a public backlash after years of what the report describes as his false claims about the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Kennedy has publicly disputed the rising death toll, and has suggested that Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, made up the measles deaths for political reasons.
Paul Offit, an infectious diseases pediatrician and internationally recognized vaccine expert, said it is “not a good look” for Kennedy and other anti-vaccine activists to see so many cases and deaths rise. “So they’re trying to say, ‘Well, it wasn’t measles,’” Offit said.
Katherine Wells, director of Lubbock Public Health, agreed. “It’s their playbook,” she said. “It’s just another tactic by them to disrupt or to question vaccines and the safety of vaccines. The issue at hand is that we’re having these large measles outbreaks, and they’re not stopping.” It is not just the deaths, Wells said, but also severe disease, with “massive” outbreaks that affect “families and communities and disrupt lives.” About one in five unvaccinated measles patients are hospitalized, according to the report. Measles erases immunity to all other illnesses for years, and survivors may years later develop subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), a complication that is fatal and untreatable.
Hooker traveled to Texas last year to interview the deceased six-year-old’s parents, who said they still would not have vaccinated their children. He shared the children’s medical records with Pierre Kory, a critical care physician with no pediatric training who lost his board certifications for promoting Covid misinformation, promoted the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin as a Covid treatment, and claimed that polio paralysis is caused not by the virus but by pesticides.
Kory, who escaped legal liability in a malpractice lawsuit brought by the estate of a Covid patient who died as a result of his treatment plan, concluded that the measles deaths were actually the result of medical error. He said the first child was prescribed “a completely inappropriate antibiotic” for a bacterial infection she developed because of measles, adding that “she did not die of measles by any stretch of the imagination,” but rather died of pneumonia and medical mismanagement. He attributed the second child’s death to “medical malpractice” because of her antibiotic regime. Privately, Kory reportedly said he suspected the two deaths were caused by a weaponized version of measles.
Hooker and a colleague both submitted complaints to the Texas medical board alleging that the antibiotics were given improperly to the sick children. In the video, he said the board is reviewing the complaints. The Guardian and Important Context were unable to confirm Hooker’s claims, and the identities of the doctors are not public. Anyone can file a complaint with a state medical board, and boards take complaints seriously; several leading anti-vaccine figures have received medical board complaints about their own conduct.
Wells said the physicians and hospitals “went above and beyond.” “It’s so hard to be told that you either wanted to hurt them or didn’t want to give the best care you could,” she said. With the accusations and possible medical board reports, she said, “I think it’s in the back of everybody’s minds.”
Hooker’s remarks followed the measles deaths of two unvaccinated infants in Pennsylvania, where he vowed to “get boots on the ground” to “make sure that if it was a hospital error that it doesn’t happen again.” Other activists are amplifying the narrative. Peter McCullough, a former cardiologist whose board certification was revoked by the American Board of Internal Medicine, noted on X that there was “no mention of antivirals, antibiotics, or steroids” in the case of the third measles death in Pennsylvania, an unvaccinated 40-year-old woman. The county coroner said the woman was not able to seek healthcare before she took a turn for the worse, so she would not have received medications for her illness.
Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, echoed Kennedy’s suggestion in a Fox News interview, saying Shapiro was “playing this out over the airwaves for political purposes, just like what happened during Covid,” and adding: “And this is why there’s such deep distrust in public health.” Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in a Fox Business interview: “We don’t know if the children died from measles or had another condition that was already attacking them and they happened to get measles at the same time.” The CDC has also called the deaths into question, listing only two of the five deaths this year in Pennsylvania; officials in Pennsylvania have said the deaths were because of measles.
The targeting of physicians extends beyond the death disputes. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton has launched investigations into doctors who vaccinate children, alleging a conspiracy with drug companies. Children’s Health Defense has funded numerous lawsuits against pediatricians over alleged side effects from vaccines, and in January the group launched a Rico suit against the American Academy of Pediatrics, which had sued Kennedy over changes to the vaccine schedule.
Kennedy no longer leads Children’s Health Defense but appears to retain close ties to the organization; at its Washington DC conference in September, he said they had “a friend in the White House.” Advocates say the group appears to be running interference for Kennedy amid a resurgence of measles, which was previously declared eliminated in the US but has made a comeback amid rising anti-vaccine sentiment. A 2021 report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate identified Children’s Health Defense and Kennedy as top promoters of vaccine misinformation.
Offit said Kennedy has been “a very successful anti-vaccine activist,” which has resulted in the largest outbreak of measles in three decades as well as the resurgence of other preventable illnesses. “Now we have more children dying of flu and measles and whooping cough — and Haemophilus influenzae type B meningitis is now coming back,” he said. The campaigns aim to “distract, distract, distract” from the damage activists have caused, Offit said. He predicted the tactic will not succeed, pointing to pushback from leaders including Shapiro and from pediatricians; when Kennedy attempted to slash vaccine recommendations in January, “pediatricians ignored him,” Offit said. “I think most people are ignoring him.”
Wells said the misinformation and mistrust may take a toll, especially on people who already doubt vaccines. “It just further divides us. It sticks with the people who want to believe that narrative, and I think it adds to the doubt that they have,” she said. But when outbreaks worsen, she said, previously hesitant families have come forward. “During our outbreak, all the parents that were hesitant came forward as soon as they heard there were cases,” Wells said, “and they got their kids vaccinated.”