“He said, ‘You don’t know what’s in the vaccine anymore,’” Peter Hildebrand, whose 8-year-old daughter, Daisy’s, funeral had been held just hours earlier, told me. “I actually asked him about it.”

For many years, he has been the country’s most prominent anti-vaccine activist. Americans “have been misled by the pharmaceutical industry and their captured government agency allies into believing that measles is a deadly disease and that measles vaccines are necessary, safe, and effective,” he wrote in a foreword to a 2021 book.

“He never said anything about the vaccine being helpful,” Hildebrand told me. He did not want to go into more detail about his conversation with Kennedy, saying he’d been advised (he didn’t say by whom) not to make any public comments. But he seemed to view the secretary’s statement as confirmation that the MMR vaccine is untrustworthy.

Hildebrand, too, blames doctors for the deaths. “I’m willing to do any- and everything I can to make sure the hospitals start getting some ‘act right’ in them so nobody else has to go through this,” he said. “They pretty much murdered them.” In the case of his daughter, he believes the hospital should have given her budesonide, a steroid often prescribed for asthma, among other conditions, that has been touted by Kennedy for treating measles. “They didn’t give her the budesonide breathing treatment that we’d been asking for,” Hildebrand said. “They were saying that the IV steroids they were giving her were better.” A spokesperson for University Medical Center in Lubbock didn’t respond to a request for comment.

When doctors are getting shot in red states over this, will our local 'bull' give a shit?

Or will there even be any doctors left in republican America to shoot?

This is evil. Full stop. I am sickened that men I used to look up to and respect want us to give this evil room to breathe and mature and grow.