After a second child has died in Texas in the massive outbreak, anti-vaxxers are reacting poorly to HHS Secretary RFK Jr’s statement that the MMR is the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles.

A child dying from measles, a preventable disease, is not an opportunity for fear-mongering. It’s a tragic reminder of what happens when public health systems fail or are undermined. CNN reporting on this incident, especially RFK Jr. attending the funeral, is not about emotional manipulation. It’s about accountability and public awareness.

Pointing out that 98% of the 481 measles cases in Texas were in unvaccinated or vaccine-status-unknown individuals is not blaming anyone. These are epidemiological facts. Measles outbreaks simply don’t spread through highly vaccinated communities.

As HHS Secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr. has a clear and urgent responsibility to promote evidence-based health measures, including the MMR vaccine. Supporting a safe, effective vaccine isn’t about obedience, it’s about protecting lives. It’s especially reasonable to question the timing of his endorsement of the MMR vaccine.

What’s really happening here is a rhetorical sleight of hand. The tweet reframes journalistic scrutiny as persecution, rebrands science-based recommendations as tyranny, and paints Kennedy as a victim rather than a powerful figure responsible for safeguarding national health. Public health officials before him, regardless of party, have endorsed vaccines not out of obedience but out of evidence and necessity.

The call for Kennedy to promote the MMR vaccine isn’t a demand for compliance, it’s a call for leadership, transparency, and responsibility. Children’s lives are at stake, and that is all that matters.

Old claims that COVID vaccines were not properly tested and may be unsafe point mainly to the idea that the vaccines had dangerous levels of residual DNA—up to 500 times more than what the FDA and WHO allow.

The concerns about changes in the vaccines tested when they became the vaccines given out are unfounded. Manufacturing a small number of vaccines for a trial is different from manufacturing thousands of doses at a time. Process 1 is the small batch process, while process 2 is the scaled-up version. Although the processes are different, they are both held to the same safety and quality standards, and the vaccines they make have to be the same.

Original claims that DNA plasmids were found in mRNA vaccines at a higher proportion of mRNA to DNA than is allowed by FDA guidelines stem from a previous preprint paper acknowledging that one limitation of the study is the “unknown provenance of the vaccine vials under study.”

They also note that the vaccines arrived without proper cold chain processes and were all expired. They follow up that paper with this preprint, where the authors obtained and tested “24 unopened expired vials” and “three vials of in-date remnants.” As mRNA degrades much faster than DNA, especially when held in suboptimal conditions, any proportion of trace amounts of DNA used in manufacturing would be amplified in expired vials, as these were,  or ones not held in optimal conditions.

In an interview on the Tucker Carlson Show, Dr. Mary Talley Bowden claims that COVID-19 vaccines cause mass deaths, are unsafe for kids, and lack proper approval.

Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, an ENT and sleep specialist, is the founder of Americans for Health Freedom, a group that often shares ideas that contradict medical science and have been proven wrong.

In this case, she claims that COVID vaccines have caused 38,000 deaths and that they should have been removed from the market. But that number comes from VAERS, a public system where anyone can report health problems after getting a vaccine—even if the vaccine didn’t actually cause the problem. The CDC and FDA check out serious reports, but just being listed in VAERS doesn’t mean the vaccine caused a death or adverse event. Many reports are missing information, haven’t been confirmed, or have nothing to do with the vaccine.

We know that COVID vaccination has saved millions of lives in the United States. One study found that, by November 2022, vaccines helped prevent more than 3 million deaths and 18 million hospitalizations across the country. Vaccines are vital in reducing serious illness and saving lives.

The video also claims that the FDA and CDC added COVID vaccines to the schedule of vaccines for kids even though they aren’t fully approved for children under 12. That’s not true. These vaccines have gone through careful testing, and some versions are fully approved for certain age groups. If a vaccine is allowed under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), it still means the FDA checked a lot of data to make sure it’s safe and works for children. EUA is often used during health emergencies when time is important, but it still requires strong safety testing.

Although COVID often causes milder symptoms in children compared to adults, it can still lead to severe illness. From December 19, 2021, to February 19, 2022, hospitalization rates for children aged 0–4 years reached 14.5 per 100,000, and babies younger than 6 months accounted for 44% of these hospitalizations. About 63% of hospitalized children had no underlying health conditions. COVID can be serious for children, which we can prevent by vaccinating children over 6 months old and through maternal vaccination during pregnancy to protect infants who are too young to be vaccinated.