In a rare sit-down interview with CBS News, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, recommended the measles vaccine and said he was “not familiar” with sweeping cuts to state and local public health programs.
The conversation was taped shortly after his visit to West Texas, where he attended the funeral of an 8-year-old girl who died after contracting measles. A raging outbreak there has sickened more than 500 people and killed two young children.
In clips of the discussion released Wednesday, Mr. Kennedy offered one of his strongest endorsements yet of the measles vaccine. “People should get the measles vaccine, but the government should not be mandating those,” he said.
A few moments later, however, he raised safety concerns about the shot, as he has previously: “We don’t know the risks of many of these products because they’re not safety tested,” he said.
For months, Mr. Kennedy has faced intense criticism for his handling of the West Texas outbreak from medical experts who believe that his failure to offer a full-throated endorsement of immunization has hampered efforts to contain the virus.
Moreover, he has promoted unproven treatments for measles, like cod liver oil. Doctors in Texas believe its use is tied to signs of liver toxicity in some children arriving in local hospitals.
Throughout the outbreak, Mr. Kennedy has often paired support for vaccines with discussions of safety concerns about the shots, along with “miraculous” alternative treatments.
Over the weekend, he posted on social media that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine was “the most effective way” to prevent the spread of measles — a statement met with relief from infectious disease experts and with fury from his vaccine-hesitant base.
That night, he posted again, this time applauding “two extraordinary healers” who he claimed had effectively treated roughly 300 measles-stricken children with budesonide, a steroid, and clarithromycin, an antibiotic.
Scientists say there are no cures for a measles infection, and that claiming otherwise undermines the importance of a vaccination.
Later in the CBS interview, Mr. Kennedy was pressed on the administration’s recent move to halt more than $12 billion in federal grants to state programs that address infectious disease, mental health and childhood vaccinations, among other efforts.
(A judge has temporarily blocked the cuts after a coalition of states sued the Trump administration.)
Mr. Kennedy said he wasn’t familiar with the interruptions, then asserted that they were “mainly D.E.I. cuts,” referring to diversity, equity and inclusion programs that have been targeted by the Trump administration.
Dr. Jonathan LaPook, CBS’s medical correspondent, asked about specific research cuts at universities, including a $750,000 grant to researchers at the University of Michigan to study adolescent diabetes.
“I didn’t know that, and that’s something that we’ll look at,” Mr. Kennedy said. “There’s a number of studies that were cut that came to our attention and that did not deserve to be cut, and we reinstated them.”
