Video shows a doctor in Texas treating kids while he was infected with measles, just one week before Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. praised him as an “extraordinary” healer, according to the Associated Press.
In a video posted on March 31 by the anti-vax group, Children’s Health Defense, which Kennedy once led, Dr. Ben Edwards is seen with measles rash on his face and confirmed that he had the disease and that symptoms started appearing one day before the video was filmed.
“Yesterday was pretty achy. Little mild fever. Spots came in the afternoon. Today, I woke up feeling good,” Edwards said in the video, adding that he was vaccinated against measles as a child and that it “wears off.”
About a week later Kennedy wrote on X/Twitter that he “visited with these two extraordinary healers,” including Edwards, and praised their use of two unproven treatments for measles.
Measles is most contagious in the four days before and after the rash first appears. The video was filmed in a makeshift clinic Edwards set up in West Texas, ground zero of the measles outbreak in the United States .
Doctors and public health experts said Edwards put children, their parents and their community at risk by deciding to go to the clinic with the disease.
In a statement to the AP Edwards argued that he “interacted with zero patients that were not already infected with measles. Therefore, obviously, there were no patients that were put in danger of acquiring measles since they already had measles.”
However, experts pointed out there were other people in the clinic who were not infected with measles including parents of sick children and members of the anti-vax group who filmed the video.
The measles outbreak began in rural Gaines County, Texas with very low vaccination rates. The diseases has since spread across 24 states. There are 800 confirmed cases nationally, but the vast majority have been reported in Texas.
Three people have died so far from complications related to measles including two elementary school-aged children. All three victims were not vaccinated against measles.
Many medical experts have taken issue with Kennedy’s approach to the current measles outbreak, which has included emphasizing unproven treatments and framing vaccination as a personal choice (which some doctors view as a nod to his anti-vaccine supporters).
The CDC currently recommends people receive two MMR vaccine doses, the first at ages 12 to 15 months and the second between 4 and 6 years old. One dose is 93% effective, and two doses are 97% effective.
