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1 week ago
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A Texas man who buried his eight-year-old daughter on Sunday after the unvaccinated child died with measles says Robert F Kennedy Jr “never said anything” about the vaccine against the illness or its proven efficacy while visiting the girl’s family and community for her funeral.
“He did not say that the vaccine was effective,” Pete Hildebrand, the father of Daisy Hildebrand, said in reference to Kennedy during a brief interview on Monday. “I had supper with the guy … and he never said anything about that.”
Hildebrand’s remarks came in response to a question about the national health secretary’s publicized visit to Daisy’s funeral. It was also after Kennedy issued a statement in which he accurately said: “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine,” which also provides protection against mumps and rubella.
Kennedy, an avowed vaccine skeptic helming the Trump administration’s response to a measles outbreak that has been steadily growing across the US, then undermined that conventional messaging by soon publishing another statement that lavished praise on a pair of unconventional practitioners who have eschewed the two-dose MMR shot in favor of vitamins and cod liver oil.
The comments from Hildebrand provided a glimpse into how Kennedy simply demurred on vaccines – rather than express a position on them – during his first visit to the center of an outbreak that as of Monday had claimed three lives.
When asked for comment on Monday, Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) did not dispute Hildebrand’s claims that the agency’s leader was silent on Sunday about vaccines.
It instead provided a link to Kennedy’s statement after the funeral, which read in part: “My intention was to come down here quietly to console the families and to be with [their] community in their moment of grief.”
Public health experts have repeatedly said the MMR vaccine is the best way to prevent deaths or serious illness from measles, a highly contagious respiratory disease.
Yet, during his brief interview on Monday, Hildebrand made clear that he stood by his skepticism of vaccines.
“I know it’s not effective because some family members ended up getting the vaccine, and they got the measles way worse than some of my kids,” said Hildebrand, who is raising two other children with his wife, Eva. “The vaccine was not effective.”
Medical professionals have long established that getting an illness one was vaccinated against does not mean the vaccination failed. Vaccines also work by reducing the severity of illness – and, in some cases, can prevent death – should people catch the sickness they were immunized against.
Daisy Hildebrand died last week at University medical center in Lubbock, Texas, about 80 miles (129km) away from her family’s home in the rural community of Seminole. Her doctors attributed her death to what they described as “measles pulmonary failure”, noting that she was not MMR-vaccinated and had no reported underlying conditions, according to a statement from Texas’s state health services department.
She was the second young child from Seminole to die from measles in about five weeks. Kayley Fehr, who was also not given the MMR vaccine, died aged six in February after contracting measles and being hospitalized in Lubbock.
An unvaccinated adult in Lea county, New Mexico, also died after contracting the measles.
Fehr was the first person in the US to die from measles since 2015. Measles had been declared eliminated from the US in 2000, but it has recently been spreading in undervaccinated communities.
Funeral services for Hildebrand and Fehr were held in the same Mennonite church in Seminole, which has a population of about 7,000, according to publicly available information. Many Mennonite communities – which tend to be close-knit – have historically been undervaccinated as they prioritize what they interpret to be medical freedom over vaccine mandates.
Children who get the MMR vaccine are typically given the first dose at 12-15 months. They usually get the second dose between ages four and six.
Respectively, the shots are 93% and 97% effective, says the US Centers for Diseases Control.
The west Texas county to which Seminole belongs, Gaines, has one of the highest vaccine exemption rates in the state. Around the time of Hildebrand’s death, it had reported about 300 measles cases since January. That was more than 65% of the nearly 500 measles cases which had then been reported in Texas.
As of Friday, the US government was reporting more than 605 measles cases across 22 states for the year so far. At least 74 of those cases – roughly 12% – had led to hospitalizations.
Kansas, Ohio and Oklahoma joined Texas as well as New Mexico in having active measles outbreaks, defined as three or more cases, officials said.
The US reported 285 measles cases in all of 2024.
Experts have warned that the US’s collective outbreak could continue for several more months, if not for about a year. They have also said the US should prepare for more measles-related deaths without a more aggressive response.
The US Senate’s health committee has summoned Kennedy to testify before the group on Thursday. Despite Kennedy’s well-documented vaccine skepticism, the Senate voted 52-48 to confirm him as the national health secretary.
