Keeping with Kennedy’s advice, US measles patients turn to unproven treatments

WASHINGTON - Struggling to contain a raging measles epidemic in West Texas, public health officials increasingly worry that residents are relying on unproven remedies endorsed by US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr and postponing doctor’s visits until the illness has worsened.

Hospitals and officials sounded an alarm this past week, issuing a notice explaining which measles symptoms warranted immediate medical attention and stressing the importance of timely treatment.

“I’m worried we have kids and parents that are taking all of these other medications and then delaying care,” said Ms Katherine Wells, director of public health in Lubbock, Texas, where many of the sickest children in this outbreak have been hospitalised.

Some seriously ill children had been given alternative remedies such as cod liver oil, she added.

“If they’re so, so sick and have low oxygen levels, they should have been in the hospital a day or two earlier,” she said.

The growing outbreak has spread to nearly 260 people in Texas. So far, 34 patients have been hospitalised, and one child has died. In neighbouring New Mexico counties, the virus has sickened 35 and hospitalised two. Two cases in Oklahoma have also been linked to the outbreak.

Texas health officials believe the true number of cases is far higher. In all, there have been 301 measles cases in the United States in 2025, the highest number since 2019, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reported on March 14.

In his first public statements about the outbreak, Mr Kennedy faced intense backlash for minimising the situation, saying it was “not unusual” and falsely claiming that many people hospitalised were there “mainly for quarantine”.

Mr Kennedy later altered his approach, offering a muted recommendation of vaccines for people in West Texas while also promoting unproven treatments like cod liver oil, which has vitamin A, and touting “almost miraculous and instantaneous” recoveries with steroids or antibiotics.

There is no such cure for measles, only medications to help manage the symptoms.

Vaccination is the most effective way to prevent the infection.

While doctors will sometimes administer high doses of vitamin A in a hospital to help manage severe cases of measles, there is no credible evidence that supplements are effective for treating or preventing measles.

Experts also noted that antibiotics, which fight bacterial infections, may be used to treat secondary infections but do not stop measles itself, which is a virus.

In Gaines County, Texas, the epicentre of the measles outbreak, alternative medicine has always been popular.

Many in the area’s large Mennonite community, where most of the measles cases have been clustered, avoid interacting with the medical system and hold to a long tradition of natural remedies.

In the past few weeks, drugstores in West Texas have struggled to keep bottles of vitamin A pills and cod liver oil supplements on their shelves.

And this past week, doctors at Seminole Memorial Hospital, at the centre of Gaines County, noticed that the number of patients coming in for measles symptoms had suddenly dropped. Those who did show up were sicker than patients seen in previous weeks.

Even while cases in the community increased, Dr Leila Myrick, a physician at the hospital, said she performed half the number of measles tests, compared with those the week before.

She worried that her patients were instead going less than a mile away from the hospital to a pop-up clinic, where a doctor from a neighbouring city had been doling out alternative remedies, like cod liver oil and vitamin C.

The physician, Dr Ben Edwards, is well known in the area for producing podcasts that often discuss the dangers of vaccines, and for his wellness clinic in Lubbock, which rejects central tenets of medicine, like the idea that germs cause certain diseases.

In an interview with Fox News, Mr Kennedy said he had spoken with Dr Edwards (whom he mistakenly called Dr Ed Benjamin) and learnt “what is working on the ground”.

In an e-mail relayed through an employee, Dr Edwards confirmed that he had talked to Mr Kennedy for about 15 minutes in what he described as an “information gathering” phone call. Dr Edwards declined to speak directly with The New York Times.

In the following days, hundreds of people from the Mennonite community lined up at Dr Edwards’ makeshift clinic, held behind a local health food store, said Ms Tina Siemens, who helped organise the event.

The treatments were free, Ms Siemens said. Members of Children’s Health Defence, an anti-vaccine non-profit that Mr Kennedy helped found before becoming Health Secretary, have created a donation page online that has raised more than US$16,000 (S$21,400) to help cover the cost of “essential vitamins, supplements and medicines”.

Measles symptoms often resolve on their own within a few weeks. But in rare cases, the virus can cause pneumonia, making it difficult for patients, especially children, to get oxygen into their lungs.

There could also be brain swelling, which can cause lasting problems, like blindness, deafness and intellectual disabilities. Both complications can be deadly.

During this outbreak, hospitalised children with pneumonia have had to be intubated, Ms Wells said. In those circumstances, timely care can mean the difference between life and death. NYTIMES