RFK Jr. Looking for orders for new measles treatments instead of insisting on vaccination

With the United States opposite being Biggest outbreak of a few measles In 25 years, the Secretary of Health and Human Services will Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Federal Health Bodies instruct potential new treatments for the disease, including vitamins, according to an HHS spokesperson. The decision is the last in one Series Actions Through the best health official of the nation that experts fear, the trust of the public in vaccines will undermine as an essential aid for public health.

The announcement comes as Mr. Kennedy is confronted with intense return for his handling of the outbreak. It has been swept by large parts of the southwest where vaccination rates are low, infect hundreds and kill two young girls. On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported more than 930 cases nationwide, most of which are associated with the outbreak in the southwest.

Critics have said that Mr. Kennedy has focused too much not -treated treatments – such as supplements for liver oil – and only offered Gedempte support for The measles vaccine, which demonstrate studies, is 97 percent effective in preventing infection.

The decision to place more resources in possible treatments, rather than insisting on vaccination, can have serious consequences in the center of the outbreak.

“We don’t want to send the signal that you don’t have to be vaccinated because there is just a way to get rid of it,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Brown University School of Public Health.

Scientists have already studied various vitamins and medicines as potential treatments for Measles, said Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota.

Decades of research is not a miracle treatment for measles virus, which can cause pneumonia, making it difficult for patients to get oxygen in their lungs, and Brain swellingThat blindness, deafness and intellectual disabilities can cause.

“It is not that there has been a lack of studies,” he said.

Measles patients are usually offered ‘supporting care’ to make them more comfortable, while the virus, such as Tylenol, to get their fever, additional oxygen and IV fluids down.

The decision to look for new treatments is meant to help people who chose not to vaccinate, said the HHS spokesperson, Andrew Nixon. He added that the CDC still recommends the measles, mumps and rubella recordings as the most effective way to prevent measles.

But he said: “Our commitment is to support all families, regardless of their vaccination status, when reducing the risk of hospitalization, serious complications and death due to measles.”

As an example of such a community, Mr. Kennedy Be at the Mennonites in West -Texas, who have experienced the victim of the cases and hospital admissions in the current outbreak.

Mr Nixon said that the CDC will collaborate with universities to test new treatments for a ‘series of diseases’, which can include a combination of existing medicines and vitamins. The news of this effort was first reported by CBS News.

Experts in the field of public health were stunned by Mr. Kennedy’s decision to hunt for new treatments, instead of endorsing Schoten with decades of safety and effectiveness data. They said this has long been existing Focus on disease prevention Instead of treatment.

“This is related to saying:” Go ahead and eat what you want, don’t practice, smoke like a chimney – we are going to invest all our resources in heart transplants, “said Dr. Jonathan Temte, a former chairman of the CDC’s Vaccine Advisory Committee.

In the course of the current outbreak of measles, Mr. Kennedy offered inconsistent and sometimes conflicting reports about the MMR shot. On some points he has described the vaccine as “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles.”

He has other times his safety early: “We do not know the risks of many of these products because they have not been tested for safety,” he said in an interview with CBS News last month.

Doctors in West -Texas have said that Mr. Kennedy’s focus on treatments, instead of vaccines, has already made their job.

Early in the outbreak, he said on Fox News that he had heard of “almost miraculously and immediately recovery” with treatments such as code -livering, of which he said it was “the safest application of vitamin A.”

While doctors sometimes manage high doses of vitamin A in a hospital to manage serious measles, experts do not recommend supervising without doctors.

Shortly thereafter, doctors said they had come across measles who had had Delayed critical medical treatment In favor of staying at home and treating himself with some of the supplements that Mr. Kennedy obtained. Some children with measles were given toxic levels of vitamin AThey said.

Dr. Osterholm said that Mr. Kennedy’s plan also assumed that the beliefs of people about vaccines were resolved, while in reality clear information about their goal and safety had encouraged thousands of vaccinations in outbreaks from the past.

Despite Mr. Kennedy’s claims that Mennonites have ‘religious objections’ because they contain ‘fetus waste’, historians who study the community have that it has no religious doctrine that forbids vaccination, and vaccine experts say there is no fetal tissue in the MMR shot.

Instead, local doctors pointed to incorrect information about the safety of the shot – that Mr. Kennedy has helped perceive – as the main reason why their Mennonite patients choose their children from vaccination.