MEASLES. A second death? A deep dive into the disease, the vaccines, the risks and benefits and how it has been spun to damage Sec. Kennedy

First, tonight’s NYT repeats the slander:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/06/health/measles-death-new-mexico.html

This outbreak has been a trial by fire of the new secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent vaccine skeptic. His equivocal response has drawn harsh criticism from scientists, who say he has offered muted support for vaccination and has emphasized untested treatments for measles like cod liver oil.

Instead of broadly lauding the safety and efficacy of vaccines, as past H.H.S. secretaries did, Mr. Kennedy has said that vaccines help protect against measles but that the decision to vaccinate “is a personal one.”

… The virus also weakens the immune system in the long term, making its host more susceptible to future infections.

I have never heard this before, and if it is true, that means everyone in my generation and going back into infinity (since everyone caught measles then) had a weakened immune system. Claptrap.

I happen to know that Mr. Kennedy did not tell people to take cod liver oil instead of vaccinating. I watched the Fox clip. And Bobby told me himself that doctors in Texas told him they were treating cases with cod liver oil for vitamins A and D, clarithromycin and budesonide, a steroid, and seeing good results with this treatment. He simply repeated this information on TV, so that doctors everywhere might have more arrows in their quiver for treating measles. Better to start treatment before your lips turn blue, right?

Naturally, the vicious media twisted it. As they attempt to do daily with him. They are joined at the hip to the status quo and want him gone. Fortunately he is an exceptionally strong and determined person.

The NY Times dissed him for the same thing several days earlier.

RFK spoke on Fox 3 days ago about what was being done in Texas to deal with the measles outbreak.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/04/health/texas-measles-outbreak-kennedy.html

H.H.S. officials previously said they were shipping doses of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine to Texas, but Mr. Kennedy did not discuss vaccination, which angered the Times.

While physicians sometimes administer doses of vitamin A to treat children with severe measles cases, or who are deficient, cod liver oil is “by no means” an evidence-based treatment, said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases.

Dr. O’Leary added that he had never heard of a physician using the supplement against measles.

Maybe the Times or Dr. O’Leary should have looked up the literature on Vitamin A for measles. Funny how people with an MD after their name will shoot their mouth off about anything. (Present company included?) Here is what the WHO has to say about treating measles with Vitamin A: everyone should receive it. Duh to you Dr. O’Leary and the NYT.

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Next, I would like to show some CDC measles slides that are mostly correct. I will tell you when they are not.

You see, I disagree with a lot of people who say that COVID was a mild disease. I think it was a disease with a wide spectrum of severity. I treated a lot of really sick people. Measles is like that too. I had a very miserable case. Luckily it did not last long. Luckily I did not get encephalitis or pneumonia from it. It tends to be considerably worse than chicken pox, rubella or mumps. But mumps in an older child can make boys sterile, and rubella can severely damage a fetus when its mother is infected. It is important to know thine enemy so we can thoughtfully choose the best response.

Everyone got measles when I was a child. I have my doubts that 1 in 80 kids were hospitalized then, but it’s possible. I did not want to drink water because my mouth and swallowing hurt so much, so maybe the hospitalized kids needed iv fluids, especially the babies.

I think this slide is accurate:

Until the death last week, which we know very little about, the slide below was accurate. The 2015 death was also mysterious. Measles was not suspected but a test came up positive.

Suddenly, today 1 in 4 cases are hospitalized, compared to about 1 in 80 back in the day. That makes little sense, unless it is to isolate cases to prevent infections in young siblings, parents or elderly relatives. I earlier showed that 3-6% of Americans are considered immunocompromised, and perhaps doctors advise a lot of isolation to protect them. And remember that hospitalization/medical care is very big business. Leading to a majority of US bankruptcies.

There are always outbreaks, because with a 7-14 day incubation period, people enter the US incubating measles. There are roughly 10 outbreaks per year and overall around 150 measles cases/year in the US

Despite multiple small outbreaks every year, most Americans will never be exposed to measles. When there is no measles in your community, and therefore no risk, most people don’t need a measles vaccine.

Maine has had only one case of measles in 25 years, who happened to be a visitor from Canada and they spread it to no one. Maine also has a measles vaccination rate of >95%, better than most of the US. Maine also has a higher than average rate of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Are these things related? We do not know, though we should. Hopefully Mr. Kennedy will unlock the data and get the answer.

Now, a great deal of scientific evidence states neither the MMR nor any other vaccine causes autism. However, OTOH, many mothers have told me their child regressed into autism soon after receiving the MMR. And despite all this scientific study, we are told that no one has identified the cause of autism, even though it is now common (1 in 36 children), whereas when I grew up it was extremely rare (1 in 10,000, it is claimed). You would think we could have figured this out by now.

But wait. The same people tell us the COVID vaccines are safe and effective. They told us the Hepatitis B vaccine was safe for newborn babies, but it turned out they only collected safety information for 3 days after the shot. As I previously noted, vaccinating on Day 1 of life is a brilliant business model, because it prevents parents from proving the vaccine caused their baby’s problem since it is impossible to prove the baby didn’t have that problem at the time of birth. What a win for the vaccine industry and for their captured vaccine regulators.

The same people insist that the anthrax and smallpox vaccines are safe, ignoring extremely high rates of reported severe reactions and disabilities that result. And the federal agencies that pay for the research have not taken these vaccines off the market, or added black box warnings to the label, or been honest about how safe and how effective any of them actually are. Therefore, we cannot trust the regulators to tell us the truth or act correctly when safety issues occur. We must figure this out for ourselves.

When measles is circulating in your community, or you plan to travel somewhere where measles is endemic, the calculus changes. Maybe you would have been better off with a vaccine after all.

Or maybe you would have been better off to get measles, if you will be travelling or living with a baby in a place where measles infections are common:

• Breastfed babies whose mothers had had a case of measles as children receive antibodies in breast milk that help protect them from measles. Measles can be much more severe in babies than in older children. Vaccinated mothers cannot provide this level of protection.

Measles is not endemic anywhere in the western hemisphere. That doesn’t mean there are no cases. It means that essentially all the cases are imported (or due to the live vaccine, which occasionally causes a measles-like illness).

Dr. Christine Stabell Benn studied children in Africa, especially Guinea-Bissau, and found that children who received a live measles vaccine had a lower mortality rate than children who did not receive one. She also found, with her husband Dr. Peter Aaby, that children who received a DPT vaccine had a higher mortality rate than those who did not. What does this mean? I am not sure, but it might mean that if you live in Africa in a rudimentary setting, that getting the measles vaccine would significantly improve your child’s chance of survival. Maybe measles do too? Who knows. We are not supposed to have enough information to parse out the answers.

And if that was not enough, we now have a second death associated with measles, maybe:

An unvaccinated person who died in New Mexico has tested positive for measles, state health officials said on Thursday, possibly the second such fatality in a growing outbreak that began in West Texas.

The officials have not yet confirmed that measles was the cause of death, and said the person did not seek medical treatment before dying.

That was the sum of what the NYT had to say about it. But it was enough for the NYT to send me an email alert. It’s all about clicks, isn’t it?

What is the bottom line? There are risks from measles and risks from the vaccine. There are apparent benefits from both. If I had a child, I would NOT vaccinate at the recommended 12-15 months, or earlier as is being done now in Texas and during outbreaks. I would wait until school-age and then vaccinate, probably before kindergarten, when the risk of autism is probably passed. I would choose individual vaccines and use them one at a time. Because it has been shown that if you give the chickenpox vaccine alone with the MMR vaccine, you double the risk of a seizure, compared to giving them separately. So it stands to reason the side effects would be less, each time, if only one attenuated viral vaccine was used at a time. After all, we only give them together for convenience. The vaccine is said to be 93% effective with one dose and 98% effective with 2 doses. These numbers will drop a little over time.

A Canadian study showed that when the MMR was given to babies, approximately 1 in 150 babies wound up in the ER or doctor’s office afterwards. So why would I vaccinate, living in Maine? Because I travel a lot (I’ve been to 60 plus countries) and my children have also travelled widely. We have probably been exposed to measles on our travels. It would be pretty miserable to get measles in a foreign country and ruin your trip. It is pretty contagious, more so than all the other infectious diseases we know about.

But if you are staying home, maybe you don’t need it. Every situation is different. And everyone should have the right to balance their own risks and benefits and make this decision for themselves.

I hope I have provided enough information to chew on and help you make your own decision.