Robert F Kennedy Jr, the top health official in the United States who is known for his scepticism of vaccines, has backed the measles jab amid a deadly outbreak of the infectious disease in Texas.
In an opinion piece published by Fox News on Sunday, Kennedy said he was “deeply concerned” about the spread of the disease despite earlier suggesting that it was “not unusual”.
“Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons,” Kennedy wrote, though he said the decision to vaccinate is “a personal one”.
The US secretary of health and human services said that before the introduction of the MMR vaccine, “virtually every child” in the US contracted measles.
“For example, in the United States, from 1953 to 1962, on average there were 530,217 confirmed cases and 440 deaths, a case fatality rate of 1 in 1,205 cases,” he wrote.
US authorities last month reported the first measles death in the country in a decade after an unvaccinated school-aged child was hospitalised with the disease in northwest Texas.
As of Friday, 146 cases had been identified in the state since late January, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.
Health officials have said the cases have been concentrated in a community of Mennonites, a Christian sect that arose out of the radical factions of the 16th-century Reformation.
Kennedy, who has promoted scientifically discredited research linking vaccines to autism, attracted criticism last month when he appeared to downplay the outbreak by pointing out there had been several outbreaks already this year.
Measles can be highly dangerous for people who are not vaccinated, including young infants who are not typically eligible for immunisation.
About one in five unvaccinated individuals in the US who gets measles is hospitalised, while about one out of every 20 children with the disease gets pneumonia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.