Kennedy Press Conference Takes a Tense Turn
A member of the media pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday, despite an aide trying to dismiss his question.
Kennedy had joined Rep. Jennifer Kiggans (R-Va.) in Virginia Beach for a roundtable discussion aimed at addressing healthcare workforce shortages. Towards the end of the event, a reporter inquired about the recent measles deaths in Pennsylvania.
“Do you believe that five deaths, potentially six, from measles in the state of Pennsylvania—” the journalist attempted to ask.
Interjecting, the aide abruptly cut off the reporter, stating, “We’re also not going to talk about measles.”
The reporter, very much undeterred, replied, “He’s the highest-ranking health official in the country! He can answer that question! He’s a cabinet secretary!”
After the aide’s intervention, Kennedy began to answer but first engaged in some finger-pointing. “We’ve done better. We’re having a global measles outbreak right now,” he stated. “It’s all over the world, and the measles outbreak is occurring because so many people went unvaccinated during the COVID pandemic. This was something that Anthony Fauci, in fact, predicted.”
He elaborated, “[Fauci] said, ‘We’re gonna kill more people from measles than we save from COVID’ as we’re shutting down measles vaccination programs.”
The mention of Fauci refers to a private journal entry from him back in May 2020, during the early COVID-19 pandemic. In that entry, Fauci noted that over a million children worldwide missed their measles vaccinations due to precautions taken against the pandemic. He expressed concern that this would lead to more deaths from measles than from the virus.
“Greater than one million children worldwide have missed their measles vaccination because of the shutdown. This is terrible and needs to be addressed, since on that basis alone there would be far, far more excess deaths from measles among children than coronavirus deaths among children,” Fauci mentioned.
Kennedy went on to assert that the U.S. has “done better, and particularly my administration, has done better at controlling the outbreak than any other country in the world.” He rattled off statistics before placing the blame on Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (D) for the state’s outbreak, claiming the governor refused CDC assistance because he “didn’t want help from the Trump administration.”
According to Kennedy, the state has finally requested federal help and he is optimistic about swiftly resolving the outbreak.
Just last month, both Trump and Kennedy had pointed fingers at Shapiro regarding the outbreak in Pennsylvania. “They’ve got a bad governor in Pennsylvania. People just don’t know it. He’s very, he’s close to incompetent,” Trump remarked, with Kennedy agreeing.
In response, Shapiro criticized both Trump and Kennedy in a post on X (formerly Twitter). “Incompetence is letting measles, a disease that was declared eliminated in 2000, reemerge,” Shapiro wrote.
He continued, “Incompetence is spending your time promoting outright lies instead of urging people to get a vaccination that would protect them against this deadly disease. Incompetence is denying the tragedy of four measles-associated deaths in Pennsylvania. Incompetence is standing right behind you, Mr. President.”
