As measles cases surge past quadruple digits for the first time in three decades, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been defending religious vaccine refusal and spreading pseudoscience on Fox News

“The MMR vaccine that we currently use has millions of particles that were created from aborted fetal tissue, millions of DNA fragments,” RFK Jr. told Fox News host Bret Baier in a report aired on Thursday

It’s a wildly misleading statement. The rubella component of the MMR vaccine is grown in a lab-cultured cell line originally derived from fetal tissue in the 1960s, but no actual tissue cells are present in the vaccine. Trace DNA fragments are non-functional and regulated to be safe[…]
Framing the debate as one of personal freedom and religious persecution, Kennedy said that people refusing the vaccine on moral grounds were being “treated like lepers” and deserved more “compassion” in hospital settings

“Even in 1963, before the introduction of the vaccine, there were 400 deaths a year and there were up to 2 million measles cases,” Kennedy said. “Only very, very sick kids should die from measles”[…]
RFK Jr. has previously come under fire for suggesting it would be better if “everybody got measles,” arguing that infection provides lifetime coverage in a way the vaccine does not. However, an MMR vaccine, which is 97 percent effective for life, does not come with possible side effects of pneumonia, encephalitis, or death, unlike a measles infection