Guardian HHS secretary failed to respond to critics in editorial amid growing calls for him to resign and chaos across the agency. Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), defended his response to the largest measles outbreak in the US in 33 years in a new editorial, calling it an example of “what a focused” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “can achieve”.
Kennedy did so in a Wall Street Journal editorial published on Tuesday, which coincides with extreme tumult at the CDC and strong claims from a former employee that the secretary wasn’t even briefed on the measles outbreak.
In the piece, Kennedy praises his agency’s handling of the outbreak in west Texas, which hospitalized nearly 100 people and killed two children earlier this year.