Unvaccinated children with measles are experiencing complications due to an alternative treatment promoted by the anti-vaxxer in charge of our nation's healthcare.
As the New York Times reports, overuse of Vitamin A — health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s purported measles cure, alongside cod liver oil, which contains the same vitamin — has led to liver damage and yellowed skin in children infected with measles.
Unlike the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, which is 97 percent effective after two doses, most of the scientific evidence surrounding Vitamin A and measles suggests only that it's useful in reducing mortality rather than infection. As such, it's often administered in low, age-appropriate doses to children hospitalized with the communicable disease — but virtually all doctors insist that it should be used in tandem with, and not as as an alternative to, vaccination.
That distinction hasn't stopped Kennedy, the former head of an anti-vaccination nonprofit, from promoting the supplement as providing an "almost miraculous and instantaneous recovery" for people infected with measles during a Fox News interview he gave after the outbreak began.
As an NBC affiliate in Philadelphia noted, those comments were repeated in at least four other Fox segments aired on a single day, March 4 — and it seems that the vaccine-skeptical parents in the West Texas community where the outbreak began heard him loud and clear.
"I did not hear anything about Vitamin A until he said it on television," said Katherine Wells, the director of public health in Lubbock, Texas, a town near the center of the outbreak.
It seems the political scion's endorsement of the supplement also translated to a belief that taking it preventively can help protect children from infection. As the NYT notes, taking too much Vitamin A is especially dangerous because, unlike other vitamins, it stays stored in the fat and isn't flushed out in the urine. Ultimately, overuse can lead to Vitamin A toxicity, which can cause everything from headaches and nausea to the yellow-hued skin and liver issues doctors are seeing in their unvaccinated patients.
"I had a patient that was only sick a couple of days, four or five days, but had been taking it for like three weeks," detailed Summer Davies, a Lubbock pediatrician who's been treating children with measles since the outbreak began in the nearby Gaines County.
Though Kennedy has somewhat softened his strident anti-vaccination stance in the face of the outbreak, he's continued to push alternative treatments. He's gone so far as to send doses of Vitamin A supplements to Texas as a half-baked response to the outbreak that has thus far claimed the life of one child and led to dozens of hospitalizations.
After the health secretary began pushing cod liver oil and Vitamin A, doctors took to media outlets to warn against their over-usage and to promote the MMR vaccine. Still, those warnings seem to have fallen flat among the vaccine-skeptical in West Texas whose children are getting sick — and in at least one case, dying — from the disease that was, until recently, eradicated in the US.
"That kind of preventative use, I think, is especially concerning," explained Lara Johnson, another doctor in Lubbock, when speaking to the NYT. "When we have kids taking it for weeks and weeks, then you do potentially have a cumulative impact of the toxicity."
More on measles: Man Whose Daughter Died From Measles Stands by Failure to Vaccinate Her: "The Vaccination Has Stuff We Don’t Trust"
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