Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is advocating the use of cod liver oil as a measles remedy, but a physician revealed on Wednesday that a person infected with measles would have to take an extremely large dose for it to be effective.
Speaking to MSNBC on Wednesday, Dr. Akshay Syal, M.D. said that this goes back to Kennedy's recommendation of using cod liver oil to treat the highly infectious measles virus leaves out key context.
"Vitamin A is really only shown to be beneficial in poorer countries," he explained. "For people, you know, who may not be as well-nourished as we are here in the U.S. So, vitamin A deficiency here in the U.S. is extremely uncommon. So, that's, kind of, the backdrop here as to why we're talking about this in the first place."
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"But the important thing here, Chris, is that, you know, those cases where vitamin A can be beneficial, we're talking about, you know, 100 teaspoons of cod liver oil," he also said. "That's a lot of cod liver oil to be taking. And you know, that can of course have its own side effects. So, it's definitely not something we want to replace the vaccine with here."
Syal is a board-certified internal medicine physician at UCLA Health and instructor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
See his comments below or at the link here.