So Bobby Jr, the world’s foremost anti-vax guru went down to Texas to “comfort” the family of the second child who died from measles, after which he:
… [praised] two unconventional “healers”, one of whom was previously disciplined by the state’s medical board for “unusual use of risk-filled medications”.
The US health secretary continued to send mixed messaging over the weekend about the measles outbreak that has now claimed at least three lives, including that of two children – first touting the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine as effective, then extolling the practitioners who have eschewed it in favor of vitamins and cod liver oil.
In a tweet on Sunday following his presence in Seminole at the funeral of Daisy Hildebrand, an unvaccinated eight-year-old who died on 3 April, Kennedy said he had visited with Richard Bartlett and Ben Edwards – and claimed without evidence the anti-vax physicians had treated and healed “some 300 measles-stricken Mennonite children”.
The Texas Medical Board disciplined Bartlett in 2003 for his “inappropriate treatment of patients with intravenous antibiotics and other medications”. Kennedy’s tweet said Bartlett had used “aerosolized budesonide and clarithromycin” to treat children with measles, two drugs Bartlett reportedly previously claimed were also ingredients in his “magic bullet” treatment for Covid-19.
This is madness. How many more kids is he going to kill before he stops?
The headline of this op-ed in the NY Times by Michael Mina an epidemiologist and immunologist says it all:
He says this could be very, very bad and he reveals something I haven’t heard before:
In 2015, I led a team that found that measles can erase the immune system’s protective memory of prior infections. This “immune amnesia,” as it’s called, leaves people vulnerable to viruses and bacteria they were once protected against. In a follow-up study in 2019, we found measles can wipe out up to 70 percent of an individual’s protective immune memory.
This means that people who get measles now may be at increased risk of infection by essentially all other pathogens that they would otherwise be well protected against. After measles, these individuals have to embark on a yearslong and risk-filled recovery of re-infections and exposures to build back up the protective shields they previously had.
Jesus.
But don’t worry. Bobby says he and all the Kennedy kids had them when they were kids and they had a ball at Hickory Hill staying home from school and playing all day. But it’s not benign:
Measles is among the most contagious viruses known. A single case can cause dozens more in places where people are unvaccinated. Infants too young for vaccination, immune-compromised people and the elderly are all at risk. Measles isn’t just a fever and rash. It can cause pneumonia, brain inflammation, permanent disability and death. The virus can go dormant in the body only to re-emerge a decade or so after infection and cause rapid and fatal brain tissue deterioration.
Mina estimated that many millions of people are at risk and this thing is rapidly spreading. The good news is that we have a conspiracy theorist, clown running the show. What could go wrong?