Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the top health official in the United States, has expressed his support for the measles vaccine amid a recent outbreak of the infectious disease in Texas, Al Jazeera reports.
In an opinion piece published by Fox News on Sunday, Kennedy stated that he was “deeply concerned” about the spread of the disease.
“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,” Kennedy wrote, while also affirming that the decision to vaccinate remains “a personal one.”
The US Secretary of Health and Human Services noted that prior to the widespread use of the MMR vaccine, measles was a common childhood illness in the United States.
“For example, in the United States, from 1953 to 1962, on average there were 530,217 confirmed cases and 440 deaths, a case fatality rate of 1 in 1,205 cases,” he said.
US authorities recently reported the first measles death in the country in a decade, after an unvaccinated school-aged child in northwest Texas was hospitalized with the disease. As of Friday, the Texas Department of State Health Services reported that 146 cases had been identified in the state since late January.
Health officials have indicated that the majority of cases have been concentrated within a community of Mennonites, a Christian sect with roots in the 16th-century Reformation.
Measles poses a significant risk to unvaccinated individuals, especially young infants who are not yet eligible for immunization. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that about one in five unvaccinated individuals in the US who contract measles require hospitalization. Additionally, around one out of every 20 children with the disease will develop pneumonia.
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