Kennedy Recommends Cod Liver Oil for Measles in Texas as Deaths Mount

Kennedy and measles: vitamin A, faith, and two dead children in Texas

Measles was eradicated in the United States in 2000. A quarter-century later, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recommends cod liver oil and vitamin A to combat it, while Texas —the epicenter of the worst outbreak in years— has seen two unvaccinated minors die. This is not an internet rumor: the prescription came from his mouth in a Fox News interview.

What prescription does the Health Secretary propose

Kennedy sidesteps the MMR vaccine and maintains that vaccinating or not is a parental choice. Meanwhile, his department has sent industrial quantities of vitamin A to Gaines County, Texas, the zero zone of the outbreak. The first health crisis he faces since his Senate confirmation leaves his critical history with vaccines intact, as published: he claims these produce autism and attributes the disorder to an «environmental toxin».

Regarding this link, no scientific society supports it. The hypothesis gained popularity from a retracted 1998 article, and subsequent studies have found no association. Graphs circulating online attribute to vaccines an increase in pancreatic cancer in Norway or a drop in fertility in Denmark, but these are unverified statistical correlations that do not support the leap from coincidence to cause.

Why measles is killing again in Texas

Texas and New Mexico concentrate the outbreak. The phrase that best describes it is not medical but cultural: a mother in Seminola (Texas) told the Washington Post she would not harm her children «just so yours can be saved.» One of them, seven years old, got infected. The «save yourself» mentality coexists with plummeting immunization rates.

Those defending parental choice argue that measles is almost always benign and that they passed it as children without sequelae. It is true that most infections resolve without complications —several people report the same— but the disease does not distinguish between those who tolerate it well and those who end up with pulmonary failure. The key is cumulative probability: fewer vaccinated, more infections, more severe cases.

The figures of a collapsing immunization

Measles is just the tip of the iceberg. Coverage against diphtheria, pechuga, whooping cough, polio, and chickenpox fell in more than 30 States during the last year. Whooping cough recorded 35,000 cases in 2024, the highest figure in over a decade. And after the last natural case of polio in 1979, a man developed paralysis in 2022 in a New York county where immunization hovered around 60%.

New York already warned of the pattern: between 2018 and 2019, nearly 650 people fell ill with measles after the return of an unvaccinated child from Israel. Last year, 14 cases were recorded in the city, with a child vaccination rate today lower than then. The disease had been considered eradicated nationwide since 2000.

The pharmaceutical business and broken trust

Skepticism does not come from nowhere. Those questioning the industry cite the $4.747 billion in accumulated penalties against Pfizer since 2000, a count disseminated online based on public records. In 2024, an article published in JAMA by researchers from Mass General noted that trust in hospitals and doctors had plummeted from 71.5% in 2019 to 40% in 2024. That floor explains why an anti-system message finds an audience even if it clashes with scientific consensus.

The clinical protocol, under suspicion

Part of the analysis suggests that the two minors who died in Texas did not die from measles but from poor medical care. The argument relies on treatment guidelines: one study reviewed cases of community-acquired pneumonia and only 57% fit the 2011 guideline; another, with ten times more cases, found 65% concordance with the 2019 recommendations. The choice of antibiotic, they argue, may have weighed more than the bicho.

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With two children buried and a Health Secretary prescribing fish oil, the question is not whether vitamin A helps. It is how many outbreaks are needed for probability to stop seeming like divine punishment and start being read as arithmetic.