Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is doing whatever he can to undermine public health. Last week, he ordered his department to undertake a search for alternative measles treatments as the disease surges around the country, which came as a surprise to the many epidemiologists, doctors and others who are aware of the measles vaccine’s extreme effectiveness.

This came immediately after Kennedy announced that the department would be requiring all vaccine trials to also test proposed vaccines against placebos, a pointless and time-consuming requirement that is also unethical to trial participants.

Of course, not too long ago we did not actually need any novel remedies for measles, seeing as it had been declared eradicated in the United States 25 years ago. This was not an accident nor the result of any alternative remedies dreamed up in basements or spread on Internet forums.

The disease was vanquished because we had, through painstaking pharmaceutical research and healthy doses of public investment, developed a very effective and long-lasting therapeutic in the form of the vaccine, which would eventually conveniently be combined with immunization to other pathogens to make the MMR vaccine.

Thus we made one of the most contagious diseases — multiple times more contagious than something like COVID, to the point that every person with measles is expected to pass it to an average of 90% of other non-immune people they’re in contact with — effectively extinct in the United States. Until now, anyway.

It’s more than a bit ironic that the anti-vaccine zealots swear instead by natural immunity when vaccines themselves are designed to spur the body’s own immune response to pathogens, training it to generate the appropriate antibodies in a way that is far safer than getting the live infection itself.

Will getting measles ultimately help a girl develop a resistance to the virus? Perhaps. It might also kill her, and even if she survives, it could leave permanent damage. Measles, after all, is known for negatively impacting the body’s immune response overall, making those infected not only sick with measles but less able to fight off other pathogens, even those they had already developed some resistance to.

There’s really no way around facing the basic fact that people will die, potentially a lot of people, as a result of RFK Jr.’s quest to turn back the clock on our collective ability to combat the spread of what were essentially solved epidemics. It certainly doesn’t appear that the image of a child in a casket after becoming the second to die of measles after decades of zero measles deaths in this country — whose funeral the health secretary attended before continuing to equivocate on vaccines — had much lasting impact on him.

This is, after all, his life’s work. The scion of one of the nation’s most famous political dynasties could have dedicated his time to any cause, yet has spent the most significant chunk of his career single-mindedly casting doubt on proven public health interventions, with child vaccination a particular focus. This is not going to change, which leaves only the option of RFK being removed from the post where he can cause the most harm.

The Trump administration must reverse remove him, or Congress must take action; he lied to you, Sen. Bill Cassidy. Do something about it.

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