The latest measles revival can only be curbed by vaccination, according to Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., praising Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for backing the measles vaccine after years of vaccine skepticism.
"I want to complement Secretary of Health Bobby Kennedy because he's now encouraging people to get the measles vaccine: It is the only proven way to avoid getting the measles," Cassidy told "The Cats Roundtable" in an interview airing Sunday on WABC 770 AM-N.Y.
Dr. Cassidy, a physician, was elected to the Senate in 2014 and is now the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Cassidy is a vocal proponent of child vaccinations, despite longtime skepticism from RFK Jr. concerned that vaccinating children has helped contribute to exponentially increasing cases of autism.
"There is this kind of conversation in our country as to whether or not children should be vaccinated," Cassidy told host John Catsimatidis. "We now have two children who have died in west Texas from measles, a vaccine-preventable disease."
The U.S. now has reported 700 cases of measles after it had previously been considered eliminated in the U.S. in 2000 due to mass vaccinations, The Hill reported.
"It's been well established that vaccination does not cause autism," Cassidy told Catsimatidis, acknowledging RFK Jr.'s Senate confirmation found vaccine skepticism "one of the concerns" of the HHS secretary's nomination this winter.
During the rise of COVID and even years prior, RFK Jr. had been concerned about the rise of autism as being timed with widespread child vaccinations, if not correlated.
Medical science is the study of the unknown, never settles, and always evolving as diseases and conditions evolve, and RFK Jr. announced during a public viewing of Thursday's White House Cabinet meeting there will be a comprehensive report coming by September on the science of vaccination of the spate of autism worldwide.
He noted a "massive testing and research effort" will include "hundreds of scientists around the world."
"By September we will know what has caused the autism epidemic," Kennedy told the Cabinet in the public airing of Thursday's Cabinet roundtable. "And we'll be able to eliminate those exposures."
Despite RFK Jr.'s proclamation, the science of vaccination and research of autism will be a permanently evolving study of the unknown, making any definitive correlation by September difficult for even the world's brightest scientists and doctors.
Former Food and Drug Administration vaccine official Peter Marks resigned over alleged vaccine "misinformation" just two weeks ago, but he stressed parents continue to vaccinate their children despite skepticism over ties to autism, because measles – while treatable for adults – has proved deadly for children in a handful of cases.
"I don't know what he's going to do, and I can't make him do anything, but I can tell you, as a viewer, please consider getting your child vaccinated," Marks told CNN after his resignation. "If they're not vaccinated, it's easy to ignore measles because we haven't seen it.
"It is not just an innocent disease, benign disease. It kills one in 1,000 children in a developed country like the United States.
"We've already had two deaths in the United States, one in a child from this and these are needless deaths, because the vaccine is 98% effective against preventing measles, but close to 100% effective in preventing death."
Vaccine skeptics have argued, as they did with the experimental COVID vaccine, that the cure should not be more harmful than the disease, a notion President Donald Trump repeatedly stress in the early months of the COVID pandemic in spring of 2020.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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