Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services testifies during a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hearing for his confirmation on Capitol Hill, Jan. 30, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr., File)
Over the weekend, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. roiled the anti-vaccine community when he appeared to endorse the vaccination that prevents measles amid an ongoing outbreak in West Texas that has killed one child and sickened 159 people. But Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group that he helmed for a decade, hasn’t fallen in line with their former leader. Instead, an online fundraiser has appeared to collect donations that it says will be “used to defray the cost of essential vitamins, supplements, and medicines necessary to treat children enduring complications from the measles virus and other illnesses.”
The details of the plan, however, are murky. The fundraising site doesn’t specify exactly which treatments will be bought with the funds collected, how they will be administered, or by whom, and Children’s Health Defense didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.
The timing of the fundraiser matters. Over the last few days, following his apparent endorsement of the MMR vaccine, Kennedy has advocated for measles treatments for which there is limited medical evidence. In a Tuesday Fox News interview, he referred to “very, very good results” from treating measles with steroids, antibiotics, and cod liver oil—but he didn’t point to any specific research. Cod liver oil contains Vitamin A, which is often used in much higher concentrations to prevent complications from the disease, including blindness, but there is no credible evidence that cod liver oil itself can treat or prevent measles.
The fundraiser’s website lists its creator as Brian Hooker, a biologist and the chief scientific officer of Children’s Health Defense. It says the funds will go to Tina Siemens, a local historian of the community of Seminole, Texas. Over the last week, Siemens, a member of the local Mennonite church, has been outspoken about what she sees as the media’s unfair portrayal of her Mennonite community, some of whom choose not to vaccinate their children because of their religious beliefs.
“The media is portraying the unvaccinated as uneducated,” Siemens told Children’s Health Defense’s publication Defender on Tuesday. She said the unvaccinated families she knows “did more reading than those who say, ‘My doctor says [to get the shot], and I’m going to listen to my doctor.’”
“It’s not like, ‘Oh we’re so anxious, this is an outbreak, we got to really be scared,’ Siemens told the Washington Post earlier this week. “You work through it and you learn from your hardships and you get stronger because of it.”
Following Kennedy’s remarks about Vitamin A, some members of the anti-vaccine community have begun to tout unproven measles remedies. One such influencer is Stella Immanuel, the Texas doctor whose viral 2020 video falsely claimed that the antimalarial medication hydroxychloroquine was a Covid cure. Immanuel, who has also insisted that female reproductive problems were caused by having sex with demons, is currently selling elderberry and zinc supplements she says can “strengthen your immunity against measles.” One “bundle” she recommends, called CoviLyte, costs $170 and has been sold in her online store since the pandemic.
The Weston A. Price Foundation, a group that advocates for diets based around animal fats and has promoted raw milk, posted on X this week to its 43,000 followers, that measles “is not the disease it is portrayed as, nor has it ever been eradicated with a vaccine as we’ve often been told. What we refer to as measles characterizes symptoms that can be treated with vitamin A-rich foods.” Those claims have absolutely no basis in scientific fact.
Siemens didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. At the time of publication, the fundraiser had collected just shy of $5,000 in donations.