RFK Jr. Has Horrific Response to Measles Death

An unvaccinated child in west Texas died of measles on Wednesday, marking the first time that someone has died from the viral illness in the U.S. in a decade.

So far, 18 people have been hospitalized for the disease around Lubbock, Texas, where a measles outbreak has infected at least 124 people, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. Most of those infected are children.

The number of hospitalizations is rising, however—Dr. Lara Johnson, a pediatrician and the chief medical officer at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, told NBC News Wednesday that the state’s data was already out of date and that her team had already cared for “around 20” kids with measles so far.

But over in Washington, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seemed relatively unconcerned by the spread of the disease.

“It’s not unusual,” Kennedy said of the contagion, when pressed by reporters. “We have measles outbreaks every year.”

“We are following the measles epidemic every day,” Kennedy said, before suggesting that there was another unreported death. “Mainly we’re told that the Mennonite community—there are two people that have died, but we are watching it, and there are about 20 people hospitalized, mainly for quarantine.”

“Incidentally, there have been four measles outbreaks this year. Last year there were 16,” he added.

The last person to succumb to the disease died in 2015 during a less severe outbreak in Clallam County, Washington state, in which a couple dozen people were infected. Measles was identified as the cause of death for the unidentified woman during an autopsy, which found that she had “several other health conditions and was on medications that contributed to a suppressed immune system,” the Health Department said at the time.

Kennedy’s nonchalant approach to managing the spread of the disease is particularly alarming, as the virulent conspiracy theorist has made millions of dollars off his dangerous anti-vax rhetoric, tying autism rates to the jab. His cash flow has stemmed from anti-vax-related speaking fees, dividends from his vaccine lawsuits, and leading Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy’s anti-vax nonprofit.

Children’s Health Defense—under Kennedy’s stewardship—has had its own questionable history with measles. Preceding a deadly measles outbreak on Samoa in 2019, the nonprofit spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines throughout the nation, sending the island’s vaccination rate plummeting from the 60–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones. That year, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of 5.

Last week, Trump himself seemed to buy into the already thoroughly debunked vaccines-cause-autism conspiracy, suggesting the Pennsylvania Dutch’s simplistic and unvaccinated lifestyle could be used as a potential model to avoid the disorder.

As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have practically eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat for the average, health-conscious individual.

Amid a flurry of backlash against Republicans, Elon Musk desperately sought to temper the mood at Donald Trump’s first Cabinet meeting Wednesday.

“We will make mistakes, we won’t be perfect,” Musk said of the Department of Government Efficiency’s assault on federal spending and waste. Since Trump took office, DOGE has laid off thousands of federal workers and gutted funding for a number of federal agencies and programs.

The billionaire’s plan is still backed by Trump, but backlash against Musk and DOGE is rising across the GOP’s base as lawmakers face their own angry constituents and legal challenges arise.

His response? Oops, we’ll do better next time.

To reassure Trump’s Cabinet, Musk, who is not a Cabinet member himself, gave the example of DOGE “accidentally” canceling Ebola prevention as part of the stunning 90-day freeze on international aid and shutting down of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“I think we all want Ebola prevention,” Musk said with a smirk. “So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately and there was no interruption.” Nobody’s perfect, Musk reminded his colleagues.

Democrats, as per usual, aren’t buying Musk’s shtick. “An average person who did something as incompetent as ‘accidentally cancelling Ebola prevention’ wouldn’t be applauded, they’d be fired,” Representative Don Beyer wrote on X. “Musk is failing up in this administration because he didn’t earn his job, he bought it. It’s corrupt, and risks Americans’ health and safety.”

But Musk doubled down on DOGE’s move-fast-and-break-things approach to achieving a trillion-dollar deficit reduction by 2026.

“We do need to move quickly,” Musk told the Cabinet. “But we can do it, and we will do it.”

Donald Trump is preparing for “large-scale” mass layoffs for the federal workforce.

The Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management sent out notices on Wednesday to federal agencies telling them to prepare for staff reductions. Close to 30,000 federal employees have already lost their jobs since Trump took office last month, and these coming layoffs could dwarf that number.

The administration is ordering agencies to submit “Phase 1” reductions in force and reorganization plans by March 13, detailing the number of full-time employees that can be cut and how much money that would save over the next three years. The plans should also include “a significant reduction” in full-time employees, according to the memo, first obtained by Axios.

The notices follow Trump’s executive order strengthening Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency more than two weeks ago, which allowed agencies to only rehire one worker for every four people who leave the workforce. It seems that after last week’s federal court ruling allowing Trump’s federal employee purge to continue, Trump is about to ramp up the firings.

Over the weekend, Musk issued an ultimatum to federal workers through an OPM email and his X account asking them to provide five accomplishments or lose their jobs, which was heavily mocked before the White House backtracked and deemed it optional. Soon, it seems that no ultimatums will be necessary for large numbers of federal employees to lose their jobs. In fact, the layoffs may even be automated.

Vice President JD Vance’s hometown paper is not impressed by his first few weeks in a “nondescript role as an appendage in the Trump-Musk administration,” the Ohio Capital Journal wrote in a seething op-ed Tuesday, tearing Vance apart as a “lapdog vice-president.”

Clearly infuriated by her fellow statesmen, reporter Marilou Johanek listed Vance’s notable accolades as vice president so far, among them being rebuked by the pope and outraging NATO allies.

“The last thing the world needs now is a U.S. vice-president trashing eighty years of foreign policy with America’s closest and most enduring friends,” Johanek wrote, referring to Vance’s meeting with the leader of Germany’s far-right nationalist AfD Party, which German courts have ruled is a threat to democracy.

The Ohio native then slammed European leaders for “hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’” in a tone-deaf speech that will likely further strain U.S.-Europe relations.

“Vance, the shameless election denier in service to an authoritarian regime lawlessly dismantling a democratic republic, had the towering audacity and historical blindness to lecture his European audience on democracy,” Johanek wrote.

The author of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir about growing up poor in Appalachia, Vance credits much of his identity—both political and personal—to his Rust Belt roots. He ran on the promise of bringing jobs and prosperity back to Middle America but clearly hasn’t made the region very proud. Vance was one of the least popular vice presidential picks in history, according to polls.

“Vance has been doing us proud by attacking friends, embracing enemies, insulting humanitarians, drawing papal ire, and pontificating laughably on what makes a man a man. Seriously, what is wrong with J.D.?” Johanek concluded, asking what most of the country is wondering too.

Read the full op-ed here.

Up until yesterday, seemingly no one knew that Amy Gleason, a low-profile first-term Trump official with experience in health care tech, was the acting administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency. As of two weeks ago, attorneys for the Justice Department didn’t know, and as of Monday, DOGE staffers didn’t know.

But by Tuesday afternoon, when Gleason’s appointment was first publicly announced, the Trump administration was busy cooking up a flimsy explanation as to how she had actually been fronting the organization for weeks.

“Amy Gleason has been the DOGE administrator for quite some time, I believe several weeks, maybe a month, I’m not actually sure of the specific timeline,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a press conference Wednesday morning. “She’s a career official. She’s doing her job as the administrator of this organization.

“I know everybody is very interested in her name and who she is and what she does. There’s a lot of people who work for the federal government, they’re just trying to do their jobs and that’s what she’s doing,” she said.

But Leavitt couldn’t provide any clarity for why DOGE staffers were equally surprised to hear that Gleason—and not Elon Musk, the very high-profile DOGE chair who was appointed by Donald Trump to serve as a special government employee—had been tapped to run the group.

“You’d have to ask them. They’re clearly unaware. I don’t know,” Leavitt said, also seemingly unaware herself.

Leavitt then falsely claimed that Gleason’s appointment had been common knowledge for weeks and that the Trump administration had been completely “transparent” about her appointment. (As of Wednesday, Gleason’s LinkedIn had still not been updated to reflect her new role.)

“Everybody knew, and we said who she was to all of you because you are hounds in the media who are so obsessed with this for some reason,” Leavitt told reporters in response to a question regarding whether Gleason’s appointment had even been announced to DOGE employees. “There are so many bigger things in the world than who the DOGE administrator is.”

But knowing who runs DOGE is important. So far, Musk’s team has gained access to and gutted portions of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services; the Education, Commerce, Defense, and Energy Departments, the EPA; FEMA; NOAA; USAID; and, among other agencies, the Federal Aviation Administration, even as the nation experiences an unprecedented uptick in critical aviation crashes.