A day after attending the funeral of a non-vaccinated child who died of measles, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will begin a tour of the Southwest on Monday, highlighting the initiative highlighting nutrition and lifestyle choices as tools to combat disease.
The Make America Healthy Tour, where Kennedy takes Kennedy through parts of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, is intended to focus on some of the Secretary's ordinary interests, but the opening day is expected to end on a highly controversial day.
The tour comes as questions grow about the federal government's response to the outbreak of measles in West Texas, which has spread to other states. The death of an unvaccinated 8-year-old girl last week was the second confirmed fatality in the United States in 10 years. Kennedy attended the girl's funeral on Sunday and met with her family before continuing to Utah.
Kennedy's staff said they planned to visit multiple health centers over three days, including a medical school “teaching kitchen” to train students in the management of chronic diseases using dietary options. He will meet with Navajo leaders to discuss the cultural and logistical challenges of providing quality healthcare to tribal groups and visit a charter school in New Mexico to “integrate healthy diet and physical fitness into everyday student lives.”
During the first months of his appointment, Kennedy's policies have spread to the great Blouhaha, but the secretary himself had a relatively low profile, especially for officials with his fame. The White House encourages Kennedy to take a more public approach to his role, but the timing of his first major push-out requires him to grab a careful line around the most visible issues on the table.
Public health experts say the outbreak of measles, which currently infects nearly 500 people in western Texas, is driven by low vaccination rates. Scepticism about the safety of the vaccine, Kennedy posted on X to change his rhetoric after the girl's funeral.
It was the most conclusive statement he supported the vaccine as a preventive tool, but some public health experts were disappointed to find out that parents didn't explicitly recommend vaccinate their children and didn't say the vaccine was safe. And a few hours later, he posted again on X, praising two doctors who are caring for hundreds of measles children using unproven treatments.
For months, Kennedy stressed that vaccinations are a matter of parental choice, encouraging people to consider unproven regimens like vitamin A that can lead to toxicity, suggesting poor lifestyle choices occurring among victims.
Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist and immunologist who studied measles, said dieting and nutrition “does not benefit from preventing measles infection.”
Healthy foods and exercise “help limit the outcomes of many infectious diseases, including measles, but they cannot prevent them,” he added. “Prevention is by far the best medicine.”
Kennedy is likely to face further questions about measles at a Monday afternoon press conference in Salt Lake City, but the event aims to bring attention to a completely different issue: fluorination of drinking water.
Even before the 2024 election, Kennedy has urged states and local governments to remove fluoride from drinking water. The American Dental Association says water fluorination reduces dental decay in children and adults by at least 25%.
The fluorination debate dates back to the 1950s, swirling whether conspiracy theory was a communist conspiracy that caused brain damage. Several studies suggest that excessive fluoride exposure (at twice the amount recommended by the Environmental Protection Agency) can cause harm to infants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists fluorination as one of the 10 great public health outcomes of the 20th century.
