RFK Jr. Talks About How Great A Job He’s Doing Managing The Measles Outbreak

Failures

from the perhaps-he's-on-team-measles dept

Cases of measles in American continue to rise. As of June 5th of this year, the official case count in the country stood at 2,030 confirmed cases. In 2025’s record breaking year for measles cases, the most we’d had in 3 decades, there were 2,288 confirmed cases. We’re going to speed right past that number in 2026, given that we’re nearly there already and we’re only half way through the year.

It was just weeks ago in April when RFK Jr. decided to wash his hands of the measles problem, literally saying it has nothing to do with him and was instead the fault of dirty immigrants invading our country.

“It has nothing to do with me,” he told lawmakers. “If you’re worried about polio and tuberculosis, you should look at the immigration policies in this country. ’Cause the place where it’s occurring are the place[s] where the immigrants are going, because they’re not vaccinated.”

This anti-immigrant trope when it comes to disease is as old as time, of course, and plainly stupid. But because the measles outbreak isn’t going to go away on its own, Kennedy had to address it recently during a trip to Virginia, where measles is becoming a growing problem. And in addressing it, Kennedy managed to pack more wrong into two sentences than I’ve ever seen before.

“There’s a global measles epidemic right now, we’ve done better than any country in the world in controlling it,” Kennedy said. “At [the] CDC we encourage people to get their measles vaccination, that’s the best way to prevent yourself from getting measles.”

Stating that there is a global measles epidemic is a sneaky statement to make for a number of reasons. First, I’ll note that there is no definition of terms that comes along with the claim. Second, much of the global data on this comes from the WHO, which, to date, has published global case counts only up to 2024 on its main tracking page, though it does have some surveillance data that goes up to the current month. And that data suggests that there is an uptick of global measles cases, to be sure, but nothing like there was only a few decades ago. In 2024, for instance, the WHO counted roughly 700k global cases of measles, compared with 1.5 million cases in 1993.

But regardless of how true it is that this is a global problem, it doesn’t matter. Kennedy’s job is to keep Americans safe from disease, not the world. Hand-waving away our own measles problem by globalizing it is a non-sequitur. And claiming that America is doing better than any other country on the measles problem is so wrong as to be laughable. The WHO has a handy presentation on the current measles problem and you can see that we aren’t even handling it the best in our own region.

That chart pretty clearly shows that Brazil and Canada are both doing a far better job than us in keeping measles cases low and combating outbreaks, if nothing else. Canada has a much lower total population compared with America, but Brazil is much closer. Besides, as we stated before, Kennedy has already said that the measles outbreak has nothing to do with him. So why is he now taking credit for how great we’re doing combating it, even though we’re not. By the way, the entire European region is kicking the America region’s ass when it comes to combating measles currently.

And I don’t even know how much I have to say about Kennedy’s baffling claim that he and the CDC are huge advocates for getting vaccinated to prevent measles. As I’ve stated repeatedly, one of the tricks Kennedy pulls is to say all kinds of things about the same subject. On measles, he has said, begrudgingly, that people should get vaccinated. He’s also said it would be better for everyone to just get measles for natural immunity, not to mention that he’s attempted to blame the infected for getting the disease as well.

Telling the public to get vaccinated, but also to not get vaccinated, and that it’s their fault if they catch measles, does not distill to something so simple as “we encourage everyone to get vaccinated.”

Kennedy is a liar and a charlatan. As is common with a person like that, he’s all over the place with his public comments when it comes to the measles and what we, and he, should be doing about it. He thinks that allows him to pretend like he’s been very pro-vaccination. It doesn’t.

Remove this man from his post before he gets more people killed.

Filed Under: measles, rfk jr.