It’s good to see CNN actually calling bullshit on the most egregious of RFK jr’s lies. Not that the ones who need to see this will read, or believe, it, but at least it’s there.
“When you and I were kids, everybody got measles, and measles gave you … lifetime protection against measles infection. The vaccine doesn’t do that. The vaccine is effective for some people for life, but for many people, it wanes,” Kennedy told Hannity.
500-600 kids per year died of measles back then, asshole. Measles was eliminated in the USA in 2000 due to the effectiveness of this vaccine. Then Wakefield and Kennedy and their fellow travelers got into the grift and scared people off of it, and here we are.
Kennedy also incorrectly described adverse events from the MMR vaccine, saying it “causes deaths every year. … It causes all the illnesses that measles itself causes: encephalitis and blindness, et cetera.”
No. Just fucking no. In over 30 years of practice and many, many thousands of MMR vaccines given, I’ve seen an occasional fever or mild rash. Very occasional. He is just full of shit.
“Some years, we have hundreds of these outbreaks. … And, you know, part of that is that there are people who don’t vaccinate, but also the vaccine itself wanes. The vaccine wanes 4.5% per year,” he said.
What the fuck is he talking about? If it were that common, this would not be a huge news story!
FTA:
Since measles was declared eliminated in the US, there have been an average of about 179 cases reported each year, many of them related to international travel. There have been an average of about eight outbreaks per year – ranging from 1 to 25 annually – and most years, at least 60% of all reported cases have been tied to outbreaks. But even the worst outbreaks typically stay under 50 cases.
He made his fortune by grifting off of vaccine mis- and disinformation and fear. It has not stopped, and if this is allowed to continue, we are in deep trouble. We are only a matter of weeks into his maladministration/destruction of our already crumbling public health sector. It is scary as all hell.