RFK Jr.’s Measles Treatment? Cod Liver Oil and a Complete Lot of Different Nonsense

The measles outbreak in Texas is constant to rage on, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—the newly enshrined Well being and Human Companies secretary—is touting scientifically unsupported remedies for it. In a latest interview, Kennedy espoused the supposed advantages of dietary supplements and steroids for measles sufferers.

RFK Jr. has been making the rounds publicly as of late to debate the federal authorities’s response to the Texas measles outbreak, which has affected over 200 residents since mid-January. In a 35-minute interview with Fox Information senior medical analyst Dr. Marc Siegel, posted final week, Kennedy made many doubtful claims associated to measles, which included arguing that cod liver oil tablets, steroids, and antibiotics may very well be helpful remedies for the viral illness.

Cod liver oil dietary supplements are identified to comprise omega-3 fatty acids in addition to nutritional vitamins A and D. Analysis has proven {that a} measles an infection could be extra extreme in youngsters with vitamin A deficiency, and teams just like the World Well being Group do recommend that medical doctors present vitamin A to measles-infected youngsters in areas the place deficiency is widespread.

Nevertheless, vitamin A deficiency is extremely uncommon within the U.S. (maybe affecting around 0.3% of the overall inhabitants). Furthermore, the advantages of vitamin A for measles are thought to come back from very excessive doses of it—doses a lot increased than what is usually present in a cod liver oil capsule. There seems to be no proof that cod liver oil itself could be useful for measles. Individuals also can endure from vitamin A toxicity in the event that they take too many dietary supplements, and toxicity seems to be a bigger problem within the U.S. than deficiency.

RFK Jr. additionally praised the worth of budesonide, a steroid, and an antibiotic known as clarithromycin, claiming that native medical doctors had seen nearly “miraculous and instantaneous” recoveries after utilizing such remedies. Medical doctors have sometimes used steroids for critical measles instances, together with throughout a 2017 outbreak in Italy. A 2023 examine analyzing this outbreak found that steroid use wasn’t related to worse outcomes. Nevertheless, there’s no clear proof that steroids needs to be a normal therapy for the illness. Antibiotics can be utilized to deal with secondary bacterial infections that would emerge from measles, however usually aren’t in a position to straight deal with viral infections.

Throughout the interview, Kennedy additionally tried to downplay the specter of measles, showing to indicate that extreme and life-threatening instances normally solely occur in individuals with poor diets and an absence of train.

“It’s very, very troublesome for measles to kill a wholesome particular person,” he defined, claiming there’s a “correlation between individuals who get damage by measles and individuals who don’t have good diet or who don’t have an excellent train routine.”

It’s true that malnutrition is usually a danger issue for extreme measles and different infections. However measles can completely kill wholesome individuals, particularly in the event that they’re younger. Texas well being officers previously reported that the only real measles demise seen within the state thus far concerned a school-age youngster who had no identified underlying situations; the kid was unvaccinated, nevertheless. Measles vaccination is each extremely efficient at stopping an infection and at decreasing the severity of any infections that do not often happen. In accordance with the World Well being Group (WHO), measles vaccination applications worldwide have prevented some 60 million deaths from measles since 2000.

Kennedy has been extra supportive of measles vaccination recently, however actually nothing approaching what’s required and anticipated of a public well being chief. In each the Fox Information interview and an op-ed earlier this month, he acknowledged that the vaccine can stop measles and that it needs to be broadly really useful in communities the place the vaccination price is comparatively low. On the identical time, he claimed that these vaccines are riskier than generally believed by many consultants and that vaccination needs to be a private alternative. RFK Jr. has long spread misinformation in regards to the security of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and others, together with by supporting a debunked hyperlink between the MMR pictures and autism.

Elsewhere, the companies beneath Kennedy’s new HHS have additionally taken steps to undermine the general public’s confidence in vaccines. The CDC is reportedly planning a brand new giant examine that can as soon as once more reexamine whether or not vaccines may cause autism, as an example, regardless of a long time of proof displaying in any other case. And the Nationwide Institutes of Well being is now not funding research aimed toward decreasing vaccine hesitancy.