The measles outbreak that began in Texas is now up to 228 cases in two states, 23 hospitalizations, and one dead child, and still health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is hedging on the obvious, which is to get vaccinated.

“Good nutrition remains a best defense against most chronic and infectious illnesses,” RFK Jr. wrote in an op-ed, though parents should “understand their options to get the MMR vaccine,” for measles, mumps and rubella. Then in an interview, he promoted treatment of steroids and cod-liver oil as producing “almost miraculous and instantaneous recovery.”

The MMR vaccine is safe and effective, which is why measles no longer strikes hundreds of thousands of Americans each year. It’s a triumph that most people these days don’t remember measles as a scourge, but the danger is complacency. The Texas outbreak is mainly in Gaines County, where 17.6% of kindergartners in schools have a “conscientious exemption” to at least one vaccine.

A policy question for states is whether letting schoolchildren skip immunization on such broad grounds is unduly increasing public risk. Texas lets families opt out of vaccines for “reasons of conscience.” That language was passed in 2003, according to the Texas Tribune. Three years earlier, the measles virus had been declared eliminated from the U.S.

Now measles is erupting again, and some states are tightening school immunization laws. Last week the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld New York’s decision, amid outbreaks in 2019 that sickened 934, to end an exemption for “religious beliefs.” Today homeschoolers can decline vaccination, but children in group settings–public, private and parochial–must be immunized unless they’re medically ineligible.

Amish families and schools sued. But the Second Circuit upheld the state’s vaccine law, saying it’s a neutral, nondiscriminatory, and rational legislative response. “In six schools in Rockland County–the hotspot of the measles outbreak–up to 20% of students had religious exemptions,” the court said. The plaintiffs plan to appeal, according to their lawyer, and maybe this will go to the Supreme Court.

Even if other states want to keep letting parents opt out for bona fide religious beliefs, they could pare back more vague exemptions. Washington state did that in 2019, passing a law saying schoolkids can’t skip the MMR merely based on “a philosophical or personal objection.”

By the way, when lawmakers considered the bill, guess who showed up? RFK Jr., who brought up Nuremberg and the Geneva Convention, while saying he knows “the cure for most infectious measles, which is vitamin A.”

The reality is that there’s no substitute for vaccination, which stops the virus from spreading and protects newborns who haven’t yet been immunized. If hospitalized children in Texas don’t sufficiently prove it, we may have to relearn old lessons a much harder way.

– The Wall Street Journal