Trump’s Plan to Deal With Egg Price Catastrophe Falls Apart

“Vitamin A can accumulate in the body,” Dr. Adam Ratner, a member of the infectious disease committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told NPR. “It can be toxic to the liver. It can have effects that you don’t want for your child.” That could include liver damage, fatigue, hair loss, and headaches.

Before last week, the last person to succumb to the disease died in 2015, during a less severe outbreak in Clallam County, Washington, in which a couple dozen people were infected. Measles was identified as the cause of death for the unidentified woman during an autopsy, which found that she had “several other health conditions and was on medications that contributed to a suppressed immune system,” the state health department said at the time.

It wouldn’t be the first measles response that Kennedy has bungled, however. Children’s Health Defense—under Kennedy’s stewardship—had its own questionable history with the disease. Preceding a deadly measles outbreak on Samoa in 2019, the nonprofit spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines throughout the nation, sending the island’s vaccination rate plummeting from the 60–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones. That year, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of 5.