“Don’t do the shots,” a woman identified as the girl’s mother said through an interpreter during an interview with the organization Children’s Health Defense. The woman added there are doctors who can help, and the disease is “not as bad as they’re making it out to be.”
The prominent anti-vaccine group, which was founded and previously chaired by current HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., posted a video interview on March 17 with a couple identified as the parents of the child who died.
“We would absolutely not take the MMR,” the mother said, because the couple have four other children who contracted measles and survived. “The measles wasn’t that bad, they got over it pretty quickly.”
The interview comes as the Texas outbreak has sickened more than 300 people since January, surpassing the number of cases reported nationwide last year. Almost all the cases to date are among unvaccinated individuals or in individuals whose vaccination status is unknown.
The child was the first recorded measles death in the U.S. in a decade.
Measles was officially eliminated in 2000 due to a highly effective vaccination program, but vaccinations have waned, and a 2019 outbreak threatened that status.
Most measles cases in the U.S. are initially introduced by an unvaccinated person exposed during international travel who then brings the virus back to spread among undervaccinated communities at home.
In Texas, the outbreak has centered among a large Mennonite community in Gaines County, where vaccination rates are historically low.
In the interview, the girl’s father said measles “are good for the body,” and can help boost a person’s immune system.
It’s a claim not supported by science, but one repeated recently by Kennedy in a Fox News interview.
"And there's a lot of studies out there that show that if you actually do get the wild infection, you're protected later. It boosts your immune system later in life against cancers, atopic diseases, cardiac disease, etc," Kennedy said earlier this month.
The current outbreak represents a significant test for Kennedy, who for the first time has had to reckon his past as a longtime critic of vaccines with his new leadership of the federal health establishment.
