Robert F Kennedy Jr followed up his attendance at the Texas funeral of a child who died from measles by praising two unconventional “healers”, one of whom was previously disciplined by the state’s medical board for “unusual use of risk-filled medications”.
The US health secretary continued to send mixed messaging over the weekend about the measles outbreak that has now claimed at least three lives, including that of two children – first touting the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine as effective, then extolling the practitioners who have eschewed it in favor of vitamins and cod liver oil.
For years, Kennedy has himself baselessly sowed doubt about vaccine safety and efficacy, and sparked alarm last month when he backed vitamins to treat the illness. At the time, he had stopped short of endorsing the MMR vaccine, which he minimized as merely a “personal choice” rather than a public health and safety measure that long ago was proven effective.
In a tweet on Sunday following his presence in Seminole at the funeral of Daisy Hildebrand, an unvaccinated eight-year-old who died on 3 April, Kennedy said he had visited with Richard Bartlett and Ben Edwards – and claimed without evidence the anti-vax physicians had treated and healed “some 300 measles-stricken Mennonite children”.
The Texas Medical Board disciplined Bartlett in 2003 for his “inappropriate treatment of patients with intravenous antibiotics and other medications”.
Kennedy’s tweet said Bartlett had used “aerosolized budesonide and clarithromycin” to treat children with measles, two drugs Bartlett reportedly previously claimed were also ingredients in his “magic bullet” treatment for Covid-19.
Bartlett, who ran a short-lived congressional campaign in 2019, has something of a checkered past. During a lengthy medical career that he has said was “a calling from God”, patients complained of receiving “unnecessary diagnostic tests, medications or treatments”. And in 2021, he received a criminal trespass warning after being caught allegedly rifling through trash bags at an Ector county hospital where he did not work.
Edwards, meanwhile, has a vaccine-free “wellness practice” at a converted barn building in Seminole where he promotes better nutrition and treats patients with cod liver oil and vitamins to control the measles outbreak, according to NBC News.
Like Bartlett, Edwards is an advocate of budesonide, a corticosteroid more commonly used in the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease – and inhaled to open airways in asthma patients.
Kennedy has previously expressed admiration for the pair, telling Fox News last month that budesonide has produced “very, very good results”, and that patients had experienced “almost miraculous and instantaneous” recoveries.
Conversely, Kennedy talked up the MMR vaccine during his visit to Texas. He said the purpose of the trip was to comfort the families of Hildebrand and Kayley Fehr, a six-year-old whose death in February was the first from measles in the US in a decade.
“My intention was to come down here quietly to console the families and to be with the community in their moment of grief,” he said in an earlier post on Sunday to X.
“In early March, I deployed a CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] team to bolster local and state capacity for response across multiple Texas regions, supply pharmacies and Texas run clinics with needed MMR vaccines and other medicines and medical supplies.
“Since that time, the growth rates for new cases and hospitalizations have flattened. The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.”
Kennedy said as of Sunday there were “642 confirmed cases of measles across 22 states, 499 of those in Texas”.
The US health and human services department confirmed the death of Hildebrand to NBC late on Saturday, stating that the cause of the child’s death remained under investigation.
On Sunday, a spokesperson for the UMC Health System in Lubbock, Texas, said that the child had been hospitalized before dying and was “receiving treatment for complications of measles”, which is easily preventable through vaccination.
According to authorities, Fehr was also unvaccinated. NBC reported that Gaines county, which incorporates Seminole, has one of the highest vaccine exemption rates in Texas, at nearly 18% compared to 3% nationally.
