With measles outbreaks spreading across the country, the U.S. is likely to lose its status as a country that has eliminated the disease. Infectious disease specialists are pointing the finger directly at Robert Kennedy, Jr.
A nation loses its status when it sees at least 12 months of sustained transmission. The U.S. declared elimination of measles in 2000, but on January 20 will mark 12 months of sustained transmission.
Canada lost its status last month.
This week South Carolina quarantined at least 254 people after at least two dozen people were confirmed infected with the disease.
An outbreak in West Texas earlier this year claimed the lives of two among more than 700 cases. According to the CDC, there have been a confirmed 47 outbreaks this year.
“This is a very clear example of the damage that the anti-vaccine movement has done in the United States,” said Fiona Havers, adjunct associate professor at the Emory School of Medicine and a former infectious disease staffer at the CDC.
RFK Jr. has been one of the country’s most well-known anti-vax advocates, and Havers says that his and others’ decades of false information to the public has led to the decline in vaccination rates.
Kennedy has claimed that the MMR vaccine has an “unconscionably high injury rate” and causes “all the illnesses that measles itself causes,” but admitted after an 8-year-old girl died in Texas that the vaccine was the “most effective way to prevent the spread of measles.”
Havers called this situation “extremely embarrassing” for the U.S.
“But I do think a different administration — what we would have seen is a CDC director giving weekly updates to the press about the status of the measles outbreaks,” she said. “We would have seen money pumped out to the states, with airwaves and billboards being blanketed about measles vaccination and how that’s the most important way of controlling things.”