Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, said in an interview Tuesday that he encourages people to get vaccinated against measles after an outbreak killed two children in Texas.
“We encourage people to get the measles vaccine,” Kennedy told CBS News chief medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook during his Make America Healthy Again tour in Arizona. While he had previously said in a post on X that the MMR vaccine was “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles,” he hadn’t categorically encouraged people to get the vaccine.
“The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine,” Kennedy in a post on the social media platform X. That post was met with social media backlash from anti-vaxxers.
Kennedy has previously linked the MMR vaccine to autism. But during the CBS interview, Kennedy said that he was all for the vaccine.
“My position is people should get the vaccine,” he said. “But that the government should not be mandating this. What I’m gonna do is make sure that we have good science so that people can make an informed choice.”