Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a bizarre new “explanation” for the deadly measles outbreak sweeping western Texas.
According to public health experts, the country’s worst measles outbreak in years is being fueled by vaccination hesitancy, which critics say Kennedy has stoked for years.
Asked to defend his response to the health crisis, President Donald Trump‘s secretary of health and human services blamed that hesitancy on “aborted fetus debris” in jabs.
“There are populations like the Mennonites in Texas who are most afflicted, and they have religious objections to the vaccination because the MMR vaccine contains a lot of aborted fetus debris and DNA particles,” he said during a NewsNation town hall event Wednesday dedicated to Trump‘s first 100 days back in office.
“So, they don’t want to take it. We ought to be able to take care of those populations when they get sick.”
Vaccines do not contain aborted fetuses, fetal cells, fetal DNA, or fetal debris, according to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
For years, Kennedy has spread debunked conspiracy theories about vaccines, falsely claiming the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine causes autism, and that the COVID-19 vaccine is the “deadliest ever made.”
But this appears to be the first time he’s floated the patently false “fetus debris” claim.
More than 880 cases have been reported nationwide since February, including more than 660 cases in Texas, the AP reported Wednesday. Two unvaccinated children and one unvaccinated adult have died from the disease. Kennedy has coupled his support for people getting the vaccine with questions about vaccine safety and efficacy.
His “fetus debris” comment suggested he had no idea how vaccines are made, despite being in charge of the federal agencies that regulate them.
At the most basic level, the MMR vaccine works by introducing a weakened version of the viruses that cause measles, mumps, and rubella to the body. The weakened viruses provoke a strong immune response that also protects against more severe forms of the illness.
To produce the vaccine, the manufacturer has to grow the weakened viruses, which—like all viruses—need human cells to grow. In the process, the viruses kill the cells. Scientists then purify the virus to remove any debris or growth reagents, according to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
The purification removes unnecessary components that could trigger immune responses.
The “fetal debris” conspiracy theory—which according to the BBC gained prominence among anti-vaxxers during the COVID-19 pandemic—is rooted in the cells that are used to grow the vaccine viruses.
Most cells divide a finite number of times and then they die. But in 1951, researchers at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore created the first “immortal” cell line, HeLa, using cervical cancer cells from a 30-year-old woman named Henrietta Lacks.
The cells continued to divide indefinitely, providing an abundant supply of cells for medical researchers. They have been used for countless medical breakthroughs, including the polio vaccine.
Although the cell line has continued to propagate, the cervical tumor tissue and Lacks’ original cells are long gone.
In the 1960s and 1970s, scientists used cells from aborted and miscarried fetuses to create other immortal cell lines, according to the journal Public Discourse.
The MMR vaccine and some COVID-19 vaccines were developed using an immortalized cell line called HEK293, according to the journal Vaccine, while the J&J vaccine used a later cell line called PER.C6 from the 1990s.
The cells are called “fetal-derived” because they are descended from fetal cells. But like the HeLa cells, vaccine developers do not use any original fetal cells or tissue. In any case, vaccines that make use of the cell lines do not actually contain the cells themselves, or even pieces of their DNA, according to the Philadelphia Children’s Hospital.
That would mean Kennedy’s claim that the MMR vaccine contains “fetus debris” is the equivalent of saying the polio vaccine has “cervical cancer debris.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed to The Washington Post on Wednesday that Kennedy’s HHS plans to impose new testing requirements on vaccine developers, which public health experts warned could be onerous and arguably unethical.
New vaccines will need to be tested in placebo-controlled trials in which some people receive the vaccine and others receive an inert substance such as a saline shot, according to the Post.
The practice could add years of delay to new vaccine roll-outs and could expose placebo groups to devastating diseases, which experts say is unethical in the case of highly studied diseases such as measles and polio.
Since taking the helm at HHS, Kennedy has appointed a vaccine skeptic to investigate the debunked link between vaccination and autism, and has forced out the nation’s top vaccine regulator.
“Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine—he is pro-safety, pro-transparency, and pro-accountability,” HHS told the Post in a statement.
But David Gorski, a professor at the Wayne State University School of Medicine and managing editor of Science-Based Medicine, which debunks medical myths, said Kennedy’s actions and statements are eroding trust in vaccines.
“Instead of just an anti-vaccine activist … saying this stuff, now the federal government, HHS and FDA is now saying this stuff. That matters,” he told the Post.
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