Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday appeared to downplay the seriousness of the West Texas measles outbreak that has killed a school-age child.
The child’s death, the first from the disease in a decade in the United States, was confirmed by Katherine Wells, director of public health at the health department in Lubbock, Texas. The child had not been vaccinated against the measles.
The outbreak has so far infected at least 124 people — mostly children — in rural West Texas.
“We are following the measles epidemic every day,” Kennedy said during a meeting with President Donald Trump’s cabinet at the White House. “Incidentally, there have been four measles outbreaks this year. In this country last year there were 16. So, it’s not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year.”
Kennedy also said that two people had died in the outbreak and that the people hospitalized were done so “mainly for quarantine.”
Wells, of the Lubbock health department, and another spokesperson for the city said that there has been just one measles death in Texas so far. They said they confirmed it with state health authorities after Kennedy’s comments on Wednesday.
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If a second death did exist, the city’s spokesperson said, “we’d know about it.”
Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for HHS spokesperson, did not directly dispute the secretary’s comments but said in an email that the CDC was aware of the death of one child.
Dr. Lara Johnson, a pediatrician and the chief medical officer at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, said during a news conference Wednesday afternoon that the patients who were hospitalized were admitted because they were having trouble breathing and needed supportive care such as supplemental oxygen.
"We don’t hospitalize patients for for quarantine purposes," Johnson said.
She added that her team has cared for “around 20” kids with measles so far. Several of those patients required intensive care. None of the hospitalized had been vaccinated against measles.
The Texas Department of State Health Services has reported 18 hospitalizations so far, but number appears to be lagging, she said.
The outbreak has been limited to parts of Texas bordering New Mexico, which has reported nine measles cases. Health officials in Texas are working to see if the cases are connected.
It's unclear how the outbreak originated.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Texas Department of State Health Services told NBC News that genotype testing had linked the outbreak to a strain of the measles virus called D8 currently circulating in Europe and the World Health Organization's Eastern Mediterranean region, which includes countries in North Africa, the Middle East and Southwest Asia.
None of the samples has been linked to the vaccine.
The death in Texas is the first measles death to be reported in the U.S. since 2015, when a Washington woman died after an exposure at a health clinic. The last time a child died of measles in the U.S. was 22 years ago, in 2003, according to the CDC.
Measles was considered eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, the CDC said, because of widespread use of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (MMR).
Two doses of the shot are 97% effective in preventing the disease, and the vast majority of U.S. kids get them as the CDC recommends: one dose around age 1, and another around age 5.
But as vaccine hesitancy has increased over time, fewer kids are getting their shots. The number of children with vaccine exemptions reached an all-time high in 2023, the CDC said, of 3% of children entering kindergarten.
In Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the current outbreak, the vaccine exemption rate was nearly 18% for the 2023-2024 school year, according to health department data.
