Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sharply pushed back against Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro after the Democratic governor accused him of spreading vaccine misinformation, saying Shapiro was unable to provide a single example when challenged and later repeated the allegation publicly.
The dispute erupted Tuesday after Shapiro announced that two unvaccinated Pennsylvania residents had died from measles. The governor accused Kennedy and the Trump administration of “scaring people” and undermining public confidence in physicians and vaccines.
Kennedy said Shapiro leveled a similar charge during a telephone conversation between the two officials, but was unable to substantiate it when Kennedy asked him to identify specific misinformation he had promoted.
“During our phone conversation, Governor Shapiro also accused me of promoting vaccine misinformation,” Kennedy wrote on X. “When I asked him for an example, he was unable to provide one, but this did not deter him from publicly repeating that accusation during his press event.”
Kennedy said he responded by telling Shapiro that the Department of Health and Human Services does not accept misinformation and offered to provide the governor with “hundreds of instances” of what he characterized as vaccine misinformation disseminated during the Biden administration.
Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Shapiro said Kennedy had contacted him to offer federal assistance as Pennsylvania confronts its measles outbreak. Shapiro said he declined the offer and instead used the conversation to challenge Kennedy over statements he believes have undermined public confidence in vaccination.
“I was very, very blunt with him, and I made very clear that his actions and the rhetoric that’s coming from this administration are having a negative impact on communities across America, particularly right here in Pennsylvania,” Shapiro said, according to the Washington Examiner.
“There’s real-life consequences to scaring people and not relying on actual doctors and actual medical professionals to provide unbiased information to parents so that we can make reasonable decisions for our kids,” he continued.
Shapiro went further, accusing Kennedy of “sharing conspiracy theories and misinformation,” an allegation the HHS secretary strongly rejected.
Kennedy said another point of contention during their conversation involved the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and whether concerns surrounding its development could produce religious objections.
“At his press conference today, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro accused me of promoting conspiracy theories because I told him, during an earlier telephone conversation, that some Americans had religious objections to the MMR vaccine because it contained fetal tissue. ‘There is no fetal tissue in the MMR,’ he told me,” Kennedy wrote.
To support his argument, Kennedy cited deposition testimony from Dr. Stanley Plotkin, one of the scientists involved in developing the rubella vaccine, concerning cell-substrate DNA present in MMR II.
“Dr. Plotkin answered: ‘Yeah, that’s probably correct, yes,'” Kennedy wrote.
Kennedy also disputed Shapiro’s effort to connect him to declining vaccination rates in Pennsylvania, arguing that the governor ultimately acknowledged that much of the decrease occurred before Kennedy became HHS secretary.
“Governor Shapiro also faulted me for the decline in Pennsylvania vaccination rates from 97% – 93.2%,” Kennedy wrote. “When I pushed back on this assertion, he acknowledged that most of the decline occurred during the Biden administration.
“It’s unfortunately true that the government lockdowns, deceptions, manipulation, and overreach during COVID severely damaged public faith in the vaccine program,” he added.
{Matzav.com}
