In a vast interview, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, has outlined a strategy to contain the measles epidemic in western Texas that has moved away from traditional science, based strongly on marginal theories on prevention and treatments.
He issued an muffled call for vaccinations in the interested community, but said that the choice was personal. He suggested that the lesions of the measles vaccine were more common than known, contrary to in -depth research.
He said that natural measles natural immunity, acquired through infection, somehow protected also against cancer and heart disease, a statement not supported by research.
He applauded to questionable treatments such as cod liver oil and said that local doctors had achieved “almost miraculous and instantaneous” recoveries with steroids or antibiotics.
The worsening of the measles epidemic, which has widely spread through a mennonite community in the county of Gaines, infected almost 200 people and killed a child, the first death of this type in the United States in 10 years.
Another suspicious death for measles has been reported in New Mexico, where cases have recently increased in a county that Borders Gaines County.
The interview, which lasted 35 minutes, was published online by Fox News last week, just before the speech by President Trump at the Congress. The segments had been published previously, but the full version received little attention.
Kennedy offered messages in public health conflict while trying to reconcile the longtime approval of the government with its ten -year skepticism.
The vaccines are “recommended” for western texans, but the risks of immunization have been underestimated, he said.
Kennedy recognized that the vaccines “prevent infection” and said that the federal government was helping to ensure that people have access to “medicinal vouchers, including those who want them, for vaccines”.
“In the community highly not vaccinated as the mennonites, it is something we recommend,” he said.
Kennedy described vaccination as a personal choice that must be respected, therefore it continued to raise frightening concerns for the safety of vaccines.
He said he had been told that a dozen Mennonita children had been injured by vaccines in the County of Gaines. The people of the community wanted federal health workers to arrive in Texas “they also looked at our crossed children for vaccines and looked at them in the eyes,” said Kennedy.
Yet the MMR vaccine itself has been carefully studied and is sure. There is no link with autism, as the secretary said in the past. While all vaccines have occasional adverse effects, the health official all over the world has concluded that the benefits far exceed the very small risks of vaccination.
Kennedy said differently: “We don’t know what the risk profile is for these products. We must restore government trust. And we will do it by telling the truth and making rigorous science to understand both security and effectiveness problems. “
In response to questions about Kennedy’s position on vaccination, a health spokesman and human services indicated a recent opinion in which he wrote that the shots prevented children from contracting measles and protected people who could not be vaccinated.
“However, he believes that” the decision to vaccinate is personal, “said the spokesman, referring to Mr. Kennedy’s opinion article.
Kennedy said that it was “very difficult” for measles to kill a healthy person and that malnutrition played a role in the outbreak of Texas.
At the beginning of the interview, Kennedy recognized the severity of measles infection, observing that it can lead to death, to the swelling of the brain and pneumonia.
But it also described the disease as rarely fatal, even before 1963, when the vaccine became available. He said the measles has a “very, very low fatigue rate”.
According to the centers for the control and prevention of diseases, for every thousand of people infected with measles in the United States, the virus kills one to three. A study estimated that without vaccination today there would be 400,000 shelters and 1,800 deaths per year.
Death is not the only possible consequence. Morbillo can also cause permanent blindness, deafness and intellectual disability. Before the vaccine became available, about a thousand people had encephalitis every year due to the virus.
In the following comments, Kennedy suggested that serious symptoms mainly affected unhealthy people before contracting measles.
“It is very, very difficult for the measles to kill a healthy person,” he said, adding later that “we see a correlation between the people who hurt themselves from measles and the people who do not have a good diet or who do not have a good training regime”.
Western Texas is “a kind of food desert”, he added. Malnutrition “could have been a problem” for the child who died of measles in the county of Gaines.
Texas health officials said the child had no “known underlying conditions”.
Dr. Wendell Parkey, a doctor in the County of Gaines with many patients Mennonita, said that the community was malnourished has been wrong.
Mennonites often avoid transformed foods, increase their livestock and make their bread, observed. Since small years, many members of the community have also helped with agriculture and other physically demanding jobs.
“It’s the healthiest people here,” he said. “Nutritionally, I would put them against anyone.”
There are data to demonstrate that seriously malnourished children in poor countries often suffer worse results from measles, said dr. Sean O’Leary, president of the Infectious Diseases Committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
But there is no credible tests that bad food habits and training routines make a child more prone to measles complications, he added.
There is also ample evidence of the fact that the measles regularly killed healthy children before the MMR vaccine became available, said Patsy Stinchfield, immediate president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.
Before 1963, about 500 children, many of whom are previously healthy, died of viruses every year, he said. About 40 percent of people infected last year were hospitalized, according to the CDC
In the interview, Kennedy seemed frustrated by the fact that a preventable disease with the vaccine rather than chronic disease had attracted national attention during his first weeks as secretary.
“In this country we had two deaths from measles in this country – we have 100,000 autism diagnoses every year,” he said. “We have to keep an eye on the ball. Chronic disease is our enemy. “
The suggestion that the vaccines cause autism has been discredited by dozens of scientific studies. Scientists stressed that measles deaths are so shocking because they are preventable with vaccination.
“Natural immunity” after the infection can protect the body from various chronic diseases, said the secretary.
As a question, if you opposed the so-called measles feasts that parents are intentionally spreading the measles from a sick child to healthy children-Mr. Kennedy said that “would never recommend to someone to get sick”.
But he also praised the benefits of natural immunity, the protection acquired after being infected by a virus, claiming that it lasted longer than the immunity induced by the vaccine and could subsequently protect against tumors and heart disease.
While it is true that a measles’ infection can offer permanent protection against the virus, the risks of getting much getting far exceeded any small benefit for immunity, said dr. O’Leary.
Two doses of the MMR vaccine are about 97 % effective in preventing an infection. Even if a vaccinated person receives an innovative infection, the disease tends to be mild.
Experts also said that there is no credible tests in support of the affirmation that a measles infection protects from other diseases.
On the contrary: a measles’ infection can cause “immune amnesia”, in which the body “forgets” how to defend itself from the diseases to which it has already been exposed, making it more susceptible to future infections.
Kennedy spoke enthusiastically of the unfulfilled treatments for measles and said that the HHS would study them.
Kennedy said that the Department of Health and Human Services would have conducted clinical studies on several unreamed treatments for measles, including a steroid, Budesonide; an antibiotic called clarithromycin; and cod liver oil, which according to him was “the safest application of vitamin A.”
Kennedy said he had heard from two local doctors that these treatments had led to “miraculous and instantaneous recovery”.
“We really have to do a good job in talking to the doctors at the forefront and seeing what is working on the ground,” he said. “Therapeutic ones were really ignored by the agency for a long, long time.”
While doctors sometimes administer high doses of vitamin A to take care of children with severe measles, delivery through a food supplement such as cod liver oil makes it difficult to administer precise quantities, said dr. William Schaffner, infectious diseases specialist at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
There are no credible data to suggest that the liver oil of cod is “Somehow conceived more secure” than the vitamin to traditionally administered, he added.
Dr. Schaffner said that antibiotics, who fight bacterial infections, are not effective treatments for measles, a virus. And he was not aware of any evidence that he showed that steroids improved the results for children with measles.
Conducting a clinical experimentation of these treatments is difficult on a practical level: there are not enough children with measles in the United States to perform a great experimentation. And such a study would be ethically fraught: doctors may need to retain standard support treatments, such as vitamin A, in order to test these remedies.
The attention of Mr. Kennedy on untreated treatments has frustrated some doctors in the County of Gaines, who tried to explain to patients that there is no antiviral for measles and who have little control on which patients suffer from serious symptoms.
“We have already had to do with people who think that measles is not a big problem,” said Dr. Leila Myrick, a family medicine medical in Seminole, Texas, who deals with measles patients for several weeks.
“Now they think they can receive this miraculous treatment and that they certainly don’t need to vaccinate. It is a 100 percent that will make it more difficult. “