As U.S. Measles Cases Hit a 35-Year High and Unvaccinated Children Died, the Health Secretary Trump Installed Over His Lifetime of Anti-Vaccine Activism — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — Used His Office to Spread Debunked Falsehoods That the Measles Vaccine "Kills People Every Year" and Causes "Blindness and Deafness," and Suggested Two Pennsylvania Measles Deaths Had Been "Fabricated"

There is one job description at the center of this story: the Secretary of Health and Human Services exists to protect the health of Americans. During the worst measles outbreak in 35 years, with children dead, the person holding that office has spent his time attacking the vaccine that prevents the disease and casting doubt on whether the dead are really dead. This is not a policy dispute. It is the head of the nation's health apparatus working against its purpose.

The outbreak

The numbers are a public-health emergency. As of August 20, 2026, the U.S. had 2,777 confirmed measles cases — a 35-year high that has already surpassed 2025's record-breaking total with months left in the year, and more than 5,000 confirmed cases since January 2025. More than 90% of cases are in people who are unvaccinated or whose status is unknown. Measles had been declared eliminated in the United States in 2000; it is roaring back.

And it is killing. There have been three measles deaths in the country this year, including two children, all unvaccinated. Two of the deaths were in Pennsylvania — the state's first measles deaths in 35 years — one of them an unvaccinated newborn in Lancaster County. These are the entirely preventable consequences of falling vaccination rates.

Who Trump put in charge

The man responsible for the federal response is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Trump nominated and installed as Secretary of Health and Human Services despite decades as one of the country's most prominent anti-vaccine activists. That history was not a secret; it was the defining fact of his public life, and Trump elevated him over it. Public-health experts — including voices in The Lancet and vaccine specialists like Paul Offit — attribute the record measles outbreak directly to the decline in vaccination that Kennedy's skepticism and mixed messaging have fueled. Installing a lifelong vaccine opponent atop the nation's health agencies had a foreseeable result, and this is it.

The misinformation

Confronted with an outbreak, a health secretary has one obvious, life-saving message: get vaccinated. Kennedy has done close to the opposite. In an appearance on Fox News, he told the public a series of claims that are demonstrably false:

• that the "measles vaccine kills people every year"
• that the "measles vaccine causes blindness and deafness"
• that the "measles vaccine causes the same symptoms as measles"

Each of these is contradicted by decades of rigorous evidence. The MMR vaccine is safe and highly effective; two doses are about 97% effective at preventing measles. It is measles itself — not the vaccine — that causes blindness, deafness, brain swelling, and death, which is precisely why the vaccine exists. For the nation's top health official to invert that reality on television, during an outbreak, is not a gaffe; it is the active spread of information that will get people killed. When he visited Lancaster back in 2021, he told a crowd measles could be cured with "chicken soup and vitamin A." The position has not improved with the office.

"Fabricated"

The cruelest turn came when Kennedy suggested the two Pennsylvania deaths "may even have been altogether fabricated" by Governor Josh Shapiro or his staff — an evidence-free accusation that a state government invented the deaths of its own residents, including an infant. Shapiro said Kennedy was spreading misinformation and scaring parents; Kennedy shot back that the governor was "gaslighting." Set against a dead newborn, the instinct to call the death a possible hoax rather than a warning is its own kind of answer about priorities.

Why it belongs here

Resignation calls are growing, and even some who voted to confirm him — Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who provided a decisive vote after seeking assurances Kennedy would not undermine vaccines — have watched those assurances collapse. But the accountability does not stop at Kennedy. He holds this power because Trump gave it to him, over a public record that told everyone exactly what he would do with it. The measles outbreak is the predictable dividend of a political bargain: Trump wanted Kennedy's movement, and handed him the nation's health in exchange. The bill is being paid in cases, in a resurgent disease America had already beaten once, and in unvaccinated children who did not have to die. A government that meant to protect public health would not have made the country's leading vaccine skeptic its health secretary. This one did, and then watched him tell parents the shot was the danger.