Dr. Peter Hotez Smacks Down RFK Jr. Over Trainwreck CNN Interview
'Absolute Nonsense'
Dr. Peter Hotez smacked down HHS Secretary RFK Jr. over his remarks, during a trainwreck CNN interview, about the resurgence of measles.
Scott MacFarlane and Dr. Hotez joined Jim Acosta on Monday’s show, which produced some compelling moments.
We covered some of Dr. Hotez’s remarks in this morning’s JAMM, namely his reasons for refusing a chance to platform RFK Jr. on Joe Rogan’s show.
But Hotez had a lot more than that to say about the roadkill enthusiast at the helm of our nation’s health agencies.
In one exchange, Jim Acosta asked about that CNN interview, and Hotez didn’t hold back from eviscerating RFK over his insane campaign to make measles great again.
JIM ACOSTA: Going back to that RFK Jr. Interview on CNN, he was prodded by Dana Bash to say that parents should get their kids vaccinated for measles.
What’s been your response to the way measles has blown up in this country? We’re seeing more cases now than we’ve seen all century, and it’s the greatest number of measles cases we’ve recorded in a single year since 1991, if I’m seeing all the numbers correctly.
DR. PETER HOTEZ: Yeah, we’ve had over 2,000 cases last year, and we’ve already reached over 2 thousand this year. And so who knows, it could reach maybe 3,000 or more.
And the reason we have to be concerned is I’m worried about our losing our measles elimination status, which ironically, the CDC was the one who set the defining criteria back in 1999. And that’s terrible.
I mean, measles is a bad actor, right? 20% of kids require hospitalizations from measles pneumonia, measle encephalitis. We had two needless deaths among kids last year in West Texas because parents made the tragic decision not to vaccinate them.
And I think it’s true that Kennedy was confirmed as Health and Human Services Secretary after the first measles epidemic started in West, Texas.
But what does he do? He goes, makes these public announcements that’s filled with misinformation all during 2025.
He says, well, those 100 kids, 99 kids in Texas hospitals, they’re there not because they’re sick. They’re there because of quarantine and isolation.
No, they were there because they were sick with measles pneumonia, and measles encephylitis.
And then came this whole string of just kind of gish galloping he did with Dana Bash, you know, then he says, well, the MMR, the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine’s a leaky vaccine, whatever that means.
JIM ACOSTA: Yeah.
DR. PETER HOTEZ: Or, or then he says it declines in protective immunity 4% a year. Well, no, it declives in protective immunity, if anything, 0.04% per year. So it’s off by a factor of 100.
And then he says the vaccine is contaminated with aborted fetal remnants, which is absolute nonsense. It’s not true.
And then he repeats the whole stuff about vaccines causing autism. So that kind of stuff was the same nonsense he would say to me 10 years ago, but there was one important difference.
JIM ACOSTA: And he’s not convinced by the evidence if the research comes in he’s just not
DR. PETER HOTEZ: But the interesting new twist that I hadn’t heard from him before is when he says stuff like, or he proposes as a viable alternative, getting an infusion of supplements, vitamin A, B-desinide, and clarithromycin.
You’re scratching your head. Where’d that come from? And then you realize this is all the language of the health and wellness influencer industry. So he’s clearly bought into the rhetoric of that industry, which you know, works overtime to sell their ivermectin and their hydroxychloroquine and does nothing.
And there’s just the same kind of stuff. So this whole MAHA thing is very much connected to the wellness and influencer industry.
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