In mid-March, the parents of a 6-year-old girl in Texas who died of measles complications — the first measles-related child death in the United States in more than 20 years — decided to speak out about what happened to their daughter.

But it was not an interview with a news outlet. The parents had agreed to an exclusive on-camera interview with staff from the Children’s Health Defense (CHD), a nonprofit that promotes anti-vaccine sentiment and policies. Their daughter, Kayley, had been unvaccinated,
a point the parents defended in the interview.

Kayley’s father, who spoke at times in a German dialect through a translator, said that measles is “not as bad as the media is making it out to be.”

A few weeks later, the father of an 8-year-old who became the second measles-related death, according to public health officials, also spoke with CHD through video. Asked if he regrets not vaccinating his child, Daisy, or his other children, the father said: “Absolutely not. And from here on out, if I have any other kids in the future, they’re not going to be vaccinated at all.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. met with these parents in April, he said in a post on X, “to console the families and to be with the community in their moment of grief.” He advocated for the highly effective measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine in that same post. Hours later, in a separate post, he promoted unproven medications for measles treatment.

As Kennedy tries to respond to the spread of measles cases in the United States — more than 700 cases have been reported in at least 25 states as of April 10, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — medical experts say that messaging has been mixed. But any focus on vaccination is also being undermined by CHD, the anti-vaccine nonprofit Kennedy chaired from 2015 to 2023, the year he launched a presidential campaign.

As of December 2024, Kennedy has said he is no longer officially affiliated with the group, which has repeatedly questioned the safety of vaccines, including through lawsuits. But CHD still prominently displays its former ties to Kennedy. The secretary has a standalone tab on the group’s “About” section, which credits him as its founder. Its video site features public appearances that Kennedy has made in his current role as secretary, including a recent trip to Indiana and his first major news conference in the role.

This year, CDH published a website that mimicked the design of a CDC site — with nearly identical layout, logos and typefaces — that laid out what it called research that vaccines cause autism (they do not) alongside some data debunking the theory. The InfoEpi Lab Substack first reported on the existence of the mock site.

When asked about the site by The New York Times, a spokesperson for Kennedy said the secretary would send a request to ask the group to take down the site.

An HHS spokesperson for Kennedy did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Representatives for CHD, contacted through a form on their website, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

CHD boasts a media apparatus that includes a video-focused site and podcast that shares claims about vaccine safety, including about the MMR vaccine. On these platforms, commentators and an array of guests openly criticize news coverage on the growing measles cases and related deaths, which public health officials say includes an unvaccinated adult in New Mexico as well as the two children. (Many of the videos also note that the hosts’ and guests’ views are not necessarily the views of Children’s Health Defense.)

“This constant fear mongering by the media … to see them rampage like this on inaccuracies and peddling falsehoods and just distortions, it’s terrible,” said one guest identified as a doctor to discuss one of the girls’ medical histories.

Measles, a highly contagious airborne disease, can appear through fever and a rash. It can make some people very sick: 1 in 20 people get pneumonia; 1 to 3 in 1,000 people get brain swelling known as encephalitis; and 1 in 1,000 people die.

The scope of the CHD messaging — including interviews with parents expressing vaccine skepticism — shows how so-called anti-vaxxers may be weaponizing tragedy to promote an agenda, said Kelsey Suter, a partner at Upswing, an opinion research and strategy firm that supports Democratic candidates and progressive causes. Suter has monitored online disinformation about vaccines since around the start of the pandemic for several clients.

“This group in particular has long cherry-picked individual stories and sort of held them up to represent a broader trend that doesn’t exist,” she said, noting that CHD has shared parent-centered videos in the past about purported vaccine injuries.

Kennedy is a longtime vaccine skeptic who tried to distance himself from that record during his contentious Senate confirmation process earlier this year to lead the country’s expansive health department. Before Kennedy’s longshot bid for the Democratic presidential nomination — which culminated in an independent candidacy and subsequent endorsement of Republican President Donald Trump — he was closely tied to the Children’s Health Defense.

The nonprofit, previously known as the World Mercury Project, says it aims to end “childhood health epidemics by eliminating toxic exposure.” Kennedy, also its former chief litigation counsel, took a leave from CHD in 2023 to run for office. During a Wednesday news conference, Kennedy speculated that environmental toxins could play a role in autism — a framing that autism groups have strongly denounced. (CHD has publicly linked vaccines to autism, a debunked claim.)

CHD’s messaging — which includes a standalone site for “news and views” and an accompanying newsletter — highlights an evolution of how misinformation and disinformation over vaccines is being directed at parents at a time when vaccination rates for kindergarteners is declining. Parents are already targeted by social media influencer accounts about their children’s health and wellness. Some of that information is packaged in video that can be more widely shared than in previous eras of vaccine skepticism, a phenomenon that has existed since the development of the first vaccine more than 200 years ago.

Some of the misinformation circulating online is that measles was not a dangerous disease when it spread rampantly in the 60s. (In the decade before a vaccine was available in 1963, an estimated 3 million to 4 million Americans were infected with measles each year. Between 400 and 500 died and thousands were hospitalized each year at the time.)

“It’a this kind of broader lifestyle perspective that incorporates vaccine hesitancy and is being sort of packaged up and targeted for moms in particular, but parents generally,” Suter said.

The two-dose MMR vaccine is safe and 97 percent effective in preventing measles. Side effects, which pediatricians share with parents when their children are vaccinated, can include a sore arm and mild rash. Medical professionals say the benefits of the vaccine far outweigh the risks of being unvaccinated.

“We’re not hiding the side effects, we’re just telling you what they are and we’re putting it in context,” said Dr. Kathryn Edwards, a longtime expert in infectious diseases who recently retired. “What is a more grave danger — to get infected with measles or to get the vaccine? And that is a really easy question. If you are not immunocompromised, it is much, much better to be immunized than to get the disease.”

The videos on “CHD.TV” run the gamut in terms of programming. In the video of the parents of the 6-year-old girl, they say their child had a fever, leading to a visit to a nearby hospital where her condition worsened. She died in February. Her siblings were also infected with measles, according to her parents, but they recovered. They credit treatments that medical experts say do not have a therapeutic role in treating or preventing measles infection. Still, Kennedy has defended the treatments for secondary symptoms. 

In a separate video, staff speculated about whether the 8-year-old died from a different ailment related to her hospital stay — a sentiment also expressed by her father and later Kennedy himself in a CBS interview. CHD staff also criticized the scope of hospital care that the girls received.

Abram Wagner is an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan who studies vaccine hesitancy. He said building trust within a community that is hesitant about vaccines relies on messengers who are well-known members of that community. He said it can be potent for an anti-vaccine group to travel to these communities and highlight the personal stories of parents — including the narrative technique of imagery and voice through video — to emphasize an agenda because those parents are themselves potentially trusted messengers.

Wagner said it’s important for the public to take into account the framing of these interviews involving the parents of unvaccinated children. He noted they had experienced trauma — the loss of a child — and that makes them vulnerable in such settings. He also wondered about the social impact of losing a child in a close-knit community. Both families are members of a Mennonite community at the epicenter of the outbreak in West Texas.

It sets up hard work for the public health officials, including state officials, who go into these communities to counter anti-vaccine messaging, Wagner added. This week, a CDC official told a vaccine committee that federal officials were “scraping to find the resources and personnel needed to provide support to Texas and other jurisdictions” as it relates to the outbreaks.

“The issue is, how do you create trusted messengers and how do you develop that over time?” said Wagner.

Suter said she is not surprised that the MMR vaccine has been targeted in disinformation messaging, since discredited research falsely tied that vaccine to autism.

“The MMR vaccine was really the first modern vaccine to be targeted with this kind of disinformation questioning its safety,” she said.

Suter said that before the pandemic — which propelled distrust of COVID-19 vaccines — being against vaccines still included some left-wing partisan perspective that included “crunchy” mothers. But vaccine hesitancy is now rooted in a broader topic of distrust of government officials and of the health care system.

“Now, being anti-vaccine is not exclusively right-wing coded, but is much more integrated into right-wing politics than it used to be,” she said.

Edwards said Kennedy has opened a messaging vacuum on measles and the MMR vaccine that groups like CHD have filled. Edwards noted that when Kennedy was asked in late February about the growing measles outbreak that began in Texas, he said such outbreaks are “not unusual,” a description that doctors quickly challenged. Kennedy later said in an op-ed that the decision to vaccinate “is a personal one” for parents — a framing that Edwards disagrees with.

“At that point, there should have been a strong message that vaccination should be done and will prevent disease,” she said. “The fact that there has been so much indecision and lack of clarity, in terms of what Secretary Kennedy has said and what he lets other people say, has really confused things. That has made families think that it’s appropriate not to vaccinate.”