Health and Human Services Secretary (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. brought receipts to correct Democrat Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro on the measles outbreaks around the world.
While questioning whether his agency is cutting funding for “life saving” research conducted by the National Institute of Health (NIH), DeLauro suggested that the U.S. has higher cases of measles than other countries. Kennedy told the Democrat congresswoman that she is “wrong,” pointing to the comparable number of outbreaks in Canada, Mexico and parts of Western Europe.
“The Europe you are referring to is the WHO European region, which has 53 countries in Europe and in Asia, including those with low vaccination rates like Romania that has never eliminated measles. If you compare us to Western European countries that we often compare ourselves to like Great Britain, they have seen no measles deaths this year,” DeLauro said.
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“Let me address your issue first, because I want to correct you,” Kennedy said. “We have about 1,100 measles cases in this country. The growth rate last year was 15 additional, so we have plateaued. Mexico has roughly the same number, but one-third of our population and they got 300 extra cases last week. Canada has more measles, 1,500, they have one-eighth of our population. Western Europe has about 6,000 which is ten times the number that we have. You are wrong about what you said earlier.”
Canada reported 1,506 measles cases as of April 26 in seven jurisdictions, according to the Canadian government’s measles and rubella monitoring report. In the U.S., a total of 1,001 confirmed measles cases were reported by 31 jurisdictions, including New York and Texas, as of May 8, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
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Nearly 6,000 measles cases have been reported to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), according to Channel News Asia (CNA). An HHS spokesperson confirmed this figure to the Daily Caller News Foundation, stating that this number has been internally reported to the CDC.
The Mexican state of Chihuahua’s health department confirmed 1,041 cases of measles as of Friday.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
