A day after attending the funeral of an unvaccinated child who died of measles, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. kicked off a tour through Southwestern states on Monday, spotlighting initiatives that emphasize nutrition and lifestyle choices as tools for combating disease.
The Make America Healthy Again tour, which will take Mr. Kennedy through parts of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, is intended to draw attention to some of the secretary’s common-ground interests, but the first day is scheduled to end with a highly contentious one: a news conference to highlight Utah’s new law that bans adding fluoride to public drinking water supplies.
The tour comes as questions grow about the federal government’s response to a measles outbreak in West Texas that has spread to other states. The death of an unvaccinated 8-year-old girl there last week was the second confirmed fatality from measles in a decade in the United States. Mr. Kennedy attended the girl’s funeral on Sunday and met with her family before continuing to Utah.
The secretary’s first stop on Monday was the Osher Center for Integrative Health at the University of Utah, which prides itself in taking a “whole-person” approach to patient care, including an emphasis on sleep, exercise and even community connection.
The Osher Center, set against the backdrop of the Wasatch Mountains, is equipped with a “food pharmacy” for chronic disease patients and a “teaching kitchen” to train medical students on nutrition.
With campus police stationed around the perimeter, Mr. Kennedy boarded “The Wellness Bus” there, a 40-foot vehicle that offers community health screenings for blood pressure, blood glucose, and cholesterol. He also climbed into the back of the mobile “food pharmacy,” where patients with chronic health conditions bring prescriptions for ingredients like brown rice, zucchini, almond milk and canned pears.
Mr. Kennedy also visited the school’s test kitchen — a modern space with expansive windows and indoor shrubbery — where medical students and dietitians led him through healthy snack preparations.
At the hummus station, Mr. Kennedy added each ingredient dutifully, and a medical student leaned in to push the “on” button on the food processor in front of him without putting the lid on, though an administrator stopped her just in time.
“That would have been bad,” the student said, glancing at the secretary’s white shirt and pressed suit.
The secretary’s staff said that over the course of three days, he would also visit a charter school in New Mexico that “integrates healthy eating and physical fitness into its daily student life” and meet with leaders of Navajo Nation to discuss the cultural and logistical challenges of providing high-quality health care to tribal groups.
During his first months in office, Mr. Kennedy’s policies have been unfurled with great brouhaha, but the secretary himself has been relatively low profile, particularly for an official with his degree of fame. The White House has encouraged Mr. Kennedy to take a more public-facing approach to his role, but the timing of his first major push out in the country will require toeing a careful line around the most conspicuous issue on the table.
Public health experts say the measles outbreak that has now infected nearly 500 people in West Texas is driven by low vaccination rates. Mr. Kennedy, who is famously skeptical of vaccine safety, shifted his rhetoric after the little girl’s funeral, posting on X: “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.”
It was the most definitive statement he has made endorsing vaccines as a preventive tool, but some public health experts were dismayed that he did not explicitly recommend that parents vaccinate their children and did not say the vaccines were safe. And several hours later he posted on X again, praising two doctors who are using unproven treatments to care for hundreds of children with measles.
For months, Mr. Kennedy has emphasized that vaccination was a matter of parental choice and encouraged people to consider unproven regimens like vitamin A, which can lead to toxicity, and suggested that poor lifestyle choices were at play among victims.
Diet and nutrition “don’t offer any benefit to prevent infection with measles whatsoever,” said Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist and immunologist who has studied measles.
Healthy foods and exercise can “help limit the consequences of many infections, including measles, but will not prevent them,” he added. “Prevention is by far the best medicine.”
Mr. Kennedy is likely to face further questions about measles during his news conference Monday afternoon in Salt Lake City, though the event is aimed at calling attention to an entirely different issue: fluoridation of drinking water.
Mr. Kennedy has urged states and municipalities to remove fluoride from drinking water since before the 2024 election. The American Dental Association has said that water fluoridation reduces dental decay by at least 25 percent in children and adults.
The fluoridation debate stretches back to the 1950s, when conspiracy theories swirled around whether the practice was a Communist plot to cause brain damage. Some studies suggest that excess exposure to fluoride — at levels twice the amount recommended by the Environmental Protection Agency — could harm infants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has listed fluoridation as one of the 10 great public health achievements of the 20th century.
Emily Baumgaertner Nunn is a national health reporter for The Times, focusing on public health issues that primarily affect vulnerable communities.
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