Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined Governor Mike Braun in Indianapolis Tuesday where Kennedy spoke about measles amid an outbreak in Allen County.
Allen County announced an outbreak of six cases of measles last week, with four unvaccinated children and two adults. While in Indianapolis yesterday, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, described the measles vaccine as “leaky.”
“People get measles because they don’t vaccinate,” he said. “They get measles because the vaccine wanes.”
Michael Bechill is the director of the pharmaceutical sciences program at Indiana Tech. He said while it’s true that the vaccine wanes year-over-year, studies have shown that waning doesn’t lessen the efficacy of the vaccine.
“And even at 40 years post-vaccination, there is an 80% total load left,” Bechill said. “So you have 80% of the antibodies still in circulation.”
Bechill said in order for the vaccine to be protective, the body only needs 30% of the antibodies created by the vaccine in circulation.
Kennedy also said healthy kids don’t die from measles and that doctors should be focused on learning how to treat the disease.
“Healthy children should not die of measles,” Kennedy said. “And there’s no reason they should if the doctors know how to treat it at the hospital, that will not happen.”
But Bechill said there’s no discrimination between healthy and non-healthy kids in measles death rates.
“I have not seen data that says that it’s only sick kids that die from measles,” he said. “That’s just not clinically factual.”
Kennedy said he wants to increase informed consent for vaccine choices and roll out better surveillance of vaccine injuries. He said he wants to build better trust in the Center for Disease Control.
Bechill said while there is no 100% safe vaccine with no side effects, the MMR vaccine has an excellent safety record. He said the majority of side effects from the vaccine are very mild and include things like fever, a mild rash at the injection site, or a sore arm. He said serious side effects are incredibly rare.
With the outbreak from earlier this month, Indiana became the seventh national measles outbreak of 2025, according to CDC guidelines. Bechill said he’s concerned about the rate of vaccination in the county.
“And it’s important to realize with an infection like measles, which is one of the most infectious viruses we know of, that means that you have to have a high level of vaccination in order to have something called ‘herd immunity.’”
The main epicenter of the national outbreak is in Gaines County, Texas, Bechill said, where the vaccination rate is 81.9 percent. In order to have herd immunity, he said a community needs about a 93% vaccination rate.
“Allen County, strikingly enough, has the exact same vaccination rate as Gaines County, Texas,” Bechill said.
Following the outbreak, the Allen County Department of Health offered three free vaccine clinics over the weekend. The department also has vaccines available by appointment.
Indiana Public Broadcasting's Abigail Ruhman contributed to this reporting.
