As measles cases surge past quadruple digits for the first time in three decades, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been defending religious vaccine refusal and spreading pseudoscience on Fox News.
“The MMR vaccine that we currently use has millions of particles that were created from aborted fetal tissue, millions of DNA fragments,” RFK Jr. told Fox News host Bret Baier in a report aired on Thursday.
It’s a wildly misleading statement. While the rubella component of the MMR vaccine is grown in a lab-cultured cell line originally derived from fetal tissue in the 1960s, no actual tissue cells are present in the vaccine. Trace DNA fragments are non-functional and regulated to be safe.
As of May 8, the CDC confirmed a total of 1,001 measles cases have already been detected so far in 2025, which is a sharp increase from the 285 reported in all of 2024. So far, three people have died from the disease.
Framing the debate as one of personal freedom and religious persecution, Kennedy said that people refusing the vaccine on moral grounds were being “treated like lepers” and deserved more “compassion” in hospital settings.
“Even in 1963, before the introduction of the vaccine, there were 400 deaths a year and there were up to 2 million measles cases,” Kennedy said. “Only very, very sick kids should die from measles.”
Baier clarified that the MMR vaccine doesn’t contain fetal cells, to which Kennedy asserted that the presence of DNA fragments justifies the religious objection. “I might not share those objections, [but] I respect them,” he said.
Kennedy admitted that the measles outbreak in Texas, which has now spread to 30 other states, has largely been amongst the Mennonite community and that the virus will spread through an unvaccinated population.
Measles is one of the most contagious viruses on Earth, with a 90 percent infection rate among unvaccinated people. Herd immunity for the disease requires roughly 95 percent vaccination coverage, something America slipped below in 2021. This makes outbreaks more likely and potentially uncontrollable if they begin to circulate in wider, unvaccinated populations.
RFK Jr. has previously come under fire for suggesting it would be better if “everybody got measles,” arguing that infection provides lifetime coverage in a way the vaccine does not. However, an MMR vaccine, which is 97 percent effective for life, does not come with the possible side effects of pneumonia, encephalitis, or death, unlike a measles infection.
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