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The non-profit group that Robert F Kennedy Jr built into a giant of the anti-vaccine movement is defending its old boss even as the US health secretary presides over the worst year for measles in more than 30 years.
Three people have died and 1,958 people have been reported infected with measles in the US this year, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In South Carolina, 224 people are in quarantine amid an outbreak that has sickened 144 people. Most are unvaccinated children.
Children’s Health Defense, or CHD, which Kennedy led from 2015 to 2024, produces a daily stream of articles and videos stoking fear about vaccines and falsely suggesting that the risks associated with vaccine-preventable diseases are exaggerated.
At the height of the South Carolina outbreak this month, when more than 200 people were in quarantine, CHD published an article circulating anti-vaccine tropes and arguing that criticism of Kennedy over the spread of measles was unfounded.
The article says CHD’s chief scientific officer “questioned whether measles needs to be prevented in the first place”. It quoted the host of a CHD.TV show saying it was “absurd” to blame Kennedy for outbreaks.
CHD did not respond to a Guardian request for comment.
As measles spread through the US this year, Kennedy has made statements that undermined confidence in the measles vaccine and the public health response, experts said. In one interview with CBS, he said “people should get the measles vaccine”, but then raised concerns about whether it was adequately safety-tested. In an appearance in Indiana, he said the vaccine waned in effectiveness and was “leaky”, and suggested the case counts in the US were not so bad, compared with larger numbers overseas.
The CDC says two doses of the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, is 97% effective. Most people do not experience side-effects and those that do occur are usually mild, like a fever or soreness.
“HHS and CDC continue to support strong measles containment through active monitoring and coordination with state and local health departments,” Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for Kennedy, said in an email, adding that the US was faring better than Mexico and Canada in its efforts.
“Secretary Kennedy has emphasized that vaccination remains the most effective protection against measles,” she said.
Public health experts said the article published by CHD this month was just the latest example of how the group was working off a familiar anti-vaccine playbook to defend Kennedy, downplay the dangers of disease and exaggerate the risks of vaccines – making it seem that it was worse to get vaccinated than to get sick, when the opposite is true.
These kinds of posts served multiple purposes, said Dorit Reiss, a vaccine law expert at UC Law San Francisco, who has tracked CHD and Kennedy for years. They were trying to convince themselves and people on the ground that measles was not so bad, while also defending Kennedy and themselves, she said.
“Nobody wants to believe that they’re hurting children,” Reiss said. “They will be blamed for this, and they will be rightly blamed for this, because most of the cases are in the unvaccinated and they have been promoting anti-vaccine misinformation for years.”
Public health experts said Kennedy’s leadership had hurt efforts to contain measles.
“Even if he’s not responsible for the actual start of the outbreak, he is most certainly responsible for the spread of the outbreak,” said Amy Pisani, CEO of the advocacy group Vaccinate Your Family.
It’s not the first time CHD has mobilized this year around an outbreak.
In a measles outbreak in Texas earlier this year, CHD encouraged people not to get vaccinated and traveled there to produce videos saying measles wasn’t so dangerous. “Measles is not a grave threat to America’s children,” Mary Holland, chief executive officer, said in one article. It also published videos, articles and social media posts suggesting that the people who died of measles died of something else. Kennedy later echoed CHD’s assertions, suggesting that one child’s death may have been caused by some other reason.
“She got over the measles, according to her parents, and according to the medical reports, I saw a report on it today, the thing that killed her was not the measles, but it was a bacteriological infection,” he told CBS News. He told Fox News her death was caused by pneumonia.
Pneumonia is one of many possible complications of measles, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Other measles complications include brain swelling, deafness and immune amnesia that increases susceptibility to other infections.
In its South Carolina post this month, CHD included false information about the Texas deaths, saying the two children died of “hospitals, hospital-acquired infections and biased healthcare professionals”. Local medical officials, health authorities and Kennedy’s own CDC attribute their deaths to measles.
The group’s activities in Texas became a vehicle to scare parents away from getting their children vaccinated and drove them toward alternative treatments that are not effective, said Rekha Lakshmanan of the Texas-based Immunization Partnership.
“CHD makes a lot of assertions that aren’t accurate,” Lakshmanan said. Those false assertions become a distraction from the reality that vaccines can help keep children alive and protected from disease, she added.
The group’s work is notable at a time when a new study found what researchers called an emerging online “health communication void” around measles. They said the CDC had posted just 10 times about measles across three social media platforms between January and August, far less than the average of 45.8 posts during that time frame in the past four years. From 2021 to 2024, 82% of posts promoted routine or “catch-up” measles vaccination, but not a single post from 2025 emphasized routine vaccination, the study found.
By contrast, they found CHD posted 101 times about measles on X alone during the same timeframe.
In South Carolina, 18 more people have been reported infected since 12 December. State health officials said this week that children from four schools remained in quarantine, and some would be quarantined until 2 January.
