Kennedy off to a bumpy start as US health secretary

Vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr is off to a turbulent start as US health secretary as he grapples with a deadly measles outbreak, resignations among his staff and a snub in the Senate.

Kennedy took over in mid-February facing a major health crisis, with an outbreak of the highly contagious disease that had previously been declared eradicated in the United States.

More than 300 people, mostly children, have now been infected with measles in Texas and New Mexico and two unvaccinated people have died -- the first US fatalities from the disease in a decade.

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"Some years we have hundreds of measles outbreaks, measles outbreaks every year," the man known as RFK Jr. said in a recent interview with Fox News at a fast food restaurant.

In recent weeks he has alarmed and angered medical professionals with comments downplaying the gravity of the crisis, and ambiguous remarks on vaccination and others promoting alternative remedies.

"He couldn't do a worse job than he's doing," said Paul Offit, a renowned pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases, vaccines, immunology, and virology.

"People assumed that when he became secretary of health and human services he would become somewhat more responsible to the public health, and they were wrong," Offit told AFP.

- Crisis management -

In an opinion piece published early this month by Fox News, Kennedy said: "Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons."

Still, he has raised doubts and stirred anger by continuing to question the safety of vaccines.

He claimed on Fox News in mid-March that the measles vaccine itself causes deaths "every year."

"It causes all the illnesses that measles itself cause, encephalitis and blindness, etc. And so people ought to be able to make that choice for themselves."

Offit disagreed. "He says that the measles vaccine can cause blindness and deafness. He says that measles immunity fades so that adults are no longer protected. All of those things are false, clearly and plainly false," he said, also rejecting Kennedy's suggestion of using vitamin A as an alternative treatment against measles.

Kennedy's crisis management skills have reportedly been criticized even within his own staff, with US media reporting one of his spokespersons resigned, and even by some Republicans.

Last week the White House withdrew at the last minute the candidacy of David Weldon, a close associate of Kennedy, to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) -- the main public health agency in America -- after concluding he would lose a Senate confirmation vote.

- Transparency and beef fat -

Measles is making a comeback amid a decline in vaccination rates as more and more Americans, wary of the safety of vaccines, ignore warnings from health authorities to get shots.

Kennedy is accused of contributing to this problem by arguing that there is a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism -- a debunked theory that came from a study based on manipulated data and disproven by later research.

Still, Kennedy's health department recently ordered a new study of this alleged link. A spokesman told AFP, "the rate of autism in American children has skyrocketed. CDC will leave no stone unturned in its mission to figure out what exactly is happening."

That pledge of transparency is a kind of mantra for Kennedy, a nephew of the late president John F. Kennedy, as he promises to make Americans healthy again, in part by fighting against consumption of heavily processed food.

Kennedy has set out to toughen rules on food additives but has also endorsed a fast food chain that cooks its French fries in beef tallow, or rendered fat, which had been phased out in America as unhealthy decades ago.

As for transparency, Kennedy critics say he has achieved just the opposite by doing away with a policy that let the public voice comments on health policy.

Under Kennedy, expert level meetings have been cancelled and new policies have been announced with no internal discussion in the department.

Nate Brought, who used to work for a US health agency but resigned last month, criticized Kennedy's management style.

"The way things are being handled is very much not transparent," he told AFP. "Everybody is intentionally being kept in the dark."