Janine Jackson interviewed the Vaccine Education Center's Paul Offit about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and measles for the April 4, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Trump-appointed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy is colorful, which is a problem when someone is a public hazard. Because now that Kennedy is in a position of power, we need journalists to move past anecdote to ideas—ideas that are informing actions that shape not just his reputation, but all of our lives.
Our guest suggests we could begin with a core false notion that lies in back of much of Kennedy's program.
Paul Offit is director of the Vaccine Education Center, and professor of pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He joins us now by phone from Philly. Welcome to CounterSpin, Paul Offit.
Paul Offit: Thank you.
JJ: The context for our conversation is the first measles death in the US in a decade, in Texas, where we understand they have reported, and this news is fresh, some 400 cases of measles, just between January and March, while the national number for 2024 was 285. This is a tragedy, and a tragically predictable one, due to surges of misinformation around vaccines, around disease and, frankly, around science that have been at work for years, but are turning some kind of corner with the elevation of RFK Jr.
You identified a keystone belief in Kennedy's book on Fauci that explains a lot. I would like to ask you to give us some history on that notion, where it falls in terms of the advance of science, and what the implications of such a belief can be.
PO: Sure. So in the mid-1800s, people weren't really sure about what caused diseases. There were two camps. On the one hand, there were the miasma theory believers. So miasma is just a sort of general notion that there are environmental toxins, initially that were released from garbage rotting on the streets, that caused this bad air, or miasma— kind of a poison, toxin. And so therefore diseases weren't contagious. You either were exposed to these toxins or you weren't.
And then, on the other hand, people like Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur were the germ theory believers, that believed that specific germs—as we now know, viruses and bacteria—can cause specific diseases, and that the prevention or treatment of those germs would save your life.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does not believe in the germ theory. I know this sounds fantastic, but if you read his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, on pages 285 to 288, you will see that he does not believe in the germ theory, and everything he says and does now, supports that. His modern-day miasmas are things like vaccines, glyphosate—pesticides—food additives, preservatives: Those are his modern-day miasmas.
So he is a virulent anti-vaccine activist. He thinks that vaccines are poisoning our children. He thinks no vaccine is beneficial. And so everything he says and does comports with that, even with this outbreak now in Texas, it's spread to 20 states in jurisdictions, he doesn't really promote the vaccine. Rather, he promotes vitamin A, because he believes that if you're in a good nutritional state that you will not suffer serious disease. And he still says that, even though that first child death in 20 years, that occurred in West Texas, was in a perfectly healthy child.
JJ: And again, one element of the fallout of this is that he is not just saying, don't get vaccinated, but saying cod liver oil and vitamin A. And so Texas Public Radio, for one, is reporting kids are now showing up to hospitals with toxic vitamin A levels. So his answer is instead of a vaccine… the response is sending kids to the hospital.
PO: Right. And if you're a parent, you can see what the seduction is, because here you're given a choice. He presents it in many ways as a binary choice. You can get a vaccine, which means you'll be injected, or you'll inject your child, with three weakened live viruses, or you can take a vitamin. Not surprisingly, people take vitamins, and they take more vitamins and more vitamins, as he sends just shipments of cod liver oil into the area. And so now hospitals are seeing children who have blurred vision, dizziness and liver damage caused by too much vitamin A.
JJ: And also, CBSNews is having to get hospital officials to contradict just straight-up false comments. The fallout is everywhere. Kennedy is saying, “Oh, the majority of the hospitalized cases in Texas were for quarantine purposes.” And so this person has to say, “Actually, no, no, we're not hospitalizing people for quarantine. It's because they need treatment.”
PO: The last place we should quarantine someone, by the way, with measles, is in the hospital. You don't want measles in the hospital. It's a highly contagious disease, the most contagious infectious disease.
Also, just one other point is when we say, for example, that the CDC currently states that there are 483 cases in 20 states or jurisdictions, that's confirmed cases, meaning confirmed by doing antibody testing, or confirmed by PCR analysis, that is the tip of a much bigger iceberg. People who are looking at this, and looking at the doubling time of this particular outbreak throughout the United States, estimate that it's probably at least 2,000 cases, and maybe more. And the fear is that, given the current doubling times, given that we're going to be dealing with this virus for at least six more weeks, the fear is that there'll be another child death or more.
JJ: You cited a piece in the book where Kennedy says:
Fauci says that vaccines have already saved millions and millions of lives. Most Americans accept the claim as dogma. It will therefore come as a surprise to learn that it is simply untrue.
I think the idea of resisting “dogma” is very appealing to people, because we have seen propaganda efforts, we have seen lies that are en masse, in a way. But I also think that so many folks have, for so long, trafficked in the forms of rational argument without the content, without agreed upon standards of proof, that people are just less able to recognize fallacies, to see when something is anecdotal—not untrue, but anecdotal—and that this impedes our understanding of what public health even is. Misinformation is at the center of this in so many ways.
PO: That's a really good point. I think we haven't done a very good job of explaining how science works. I mean, you learn as you go. The Covid pandemic is a perfect example. We were building the plane while it was in the air. There were definitely things that we said and did that were not right over time, but you learn as you go.
And that's the way science works. I mean, the beauty of science is it's always self-correcting. It's introspective, and you're willing to throw a textbook over your shoulder without a backward glance as you learn new things.
I was a resident training in pediatrics in the late 1970s, the Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh. I was taught things that were wrong. That's OK. That didn't mean the people, the senior pediatricians who taught me, were idiots. It just meant that we got more information over time.
And I think people, at some level, don't accept that. When you say something that ends up being wrong, “See? You can't trust them.” And so they throw the whole thing out, to their detriment.
JJ: I mean, yes, it points to a kind of preexisting, if not failure, weakness in media and public conversation about science that makes us poorly set up to engage this kind of thing. But I also think there's something going on with, you know, Marion Nestle telling the New York Times that she was so excited when Trump used the words “industrial food complex.” She said, “RFK sounds just like me.”
RFK has benefited from a position of a little guy fighting Big Corporate Food, fighting Big Pharma. And I think a lot of folks identify with that. There are things, though, that you've talked about that complicate that depiction of him as a little guy going up against well-moneyed interests.
PO: Just the term “Big Pharma” is pejorative. Have pharmaceutical companies acted aggressively or illegally or unethically? Of course they have. I think the opioid epidemic is a perfect example of that. But that doesn't mean that everything they do is wrong.
For example, I would argue that if pharmaceutical companies were interested in lying about a vaccine, and I'm on the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee, if they submitted data for licensure or authorization of a vaccine where they lied or misrepresented data or omitted data, they're going to be found out, because once vaccines are out there, there's things like the Vaccine Safety Datalink, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. There is no hiding, because we give vaccines to healthy children, and so we hold them to a high standard of safety. So there is no hiding.
And I want RFK Jr. to point to one example where “Big Pharma” has lied to us about a vaccine that's caused us to suffer harm. Where is that example? But it's so easy to make that case.
JJ: When it's presented in this binary way, as though you can be for corporate medicine or corporate food, or you can be against it, and it sort of absents the idea of, “Well, let's parse what is being said. Let's talk about these ideas. Let's talk about standards of proof,” news media that are more interested to present things as "controversial" shut down that more nuanced conversation.
PO: Right. I think probably the most depressing email that I got over the past few weeks was from a nurse in Canada, who said that she was seeing parents of a child who was one month old, and she was giving those parents anticipatory guidance about what vaccines that child would get now a month in, it was a two-month-old. And the father said, and I quote, “I'm not anti-vaccine, but I want to wait to see which vaccines RFK Jr. recommends before I get any of them.”
Which tells you how bad this has gotten. I mean that here they want to trust, basically, a personal injury lawyer to determine which vaccines we should get, as compared to the people who sit around the table at the advisory committees at the FDA or CDC.
JJ: NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny did have a thoughtful piece about employment by anti-vaccine influencers of that horrific death of the 6-year-old in Texas, and how it's being used to say, “No, we were actually right, because the other children didn't die.” But there was an immunologist cited in the story who said, “It's just harder to tell our story, because the story of ‘child does not get disease’ just doesn't have the media pickup.”
And so it is difficult for journalists to tell a different story about public health when they are so focused on individual cases and that sort of thing. And so there is a problem there in trying to get reporters to tell public health from a different perspective, and make that as compelling as it should be.
Paul Offit: "We've eliminated the memory of measles. I think people don't remember how sick that virus can make you."
PO: No, you're right. I think when vaccines work, what happens? Nothing.
But I'm a child of the 1950s. I had measles, and at the time I had measles, there were roughly 48,000 hospitalizations from measles, from severe pneumonia or dehydration or encephalitis, which is infection of the brain. And of those children who got encephalitis, about a quarter would end up blind or deaf, and there were about 500 deaths a year from measles, mostly in healthy children.
But again, not only have we largely eliminated measles from this country, which we did completely, really, by the year 2000, and it's come back to some extent, because a critical percentage of parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children. But we've eliminated the memory of measles. I think people don't remember how sick that virus can make you. Unfortunately, I think they're learning now.
JJ: I'll just ask you, finally, there's a reason you call your Substack Beyond the Noise. What's the noise, and what do you hope is beyond it?
PO: The noise is just this torrent of misinformation and disinformation on the internet. I mean, most people get their information from social media, and it's just like trying to fight against the fire hose of information. And all you can do is the best you can do.
But I think in the end, I think the great educator, sadly, is going to be these viruses or these bacteria, which, if we continue along the path that we're doing, which is not trusting public health and not trusting that vaccines are safe and effective, and believing a lot of the misinformation online, we're just going to see more and more of these outbreaks, especially with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of HHS.
Look at what’s happened in West Texas. You had this massive outbreak in West Texas. So he then goes on national television and says things like: The measles vaccine kills people every year. The measles vaccine causes blindness and deafness. The measles vaccine causes the same symptoms as measles. Natural measles can protect you against cancer. All of that is wrong.
But the mother of this 6-year-old girl, that perfectly healthy 6-year-old girl who died, said one of the reasons that she didn't vaccinate was that she thought that the natural infection would protect against cancer, which is something RFK Jr. said that was wrong. So basically, misinformation kills, and I think that until we understand where the best information is, we're going to continue to suffer this.
JJ: We’ll end it there for now. We've been speaking with Paul Offit, who's director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. His Substack is called Beyond the Noise. Thank you so much, Paul Offit, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
