RHONE: Measles in Atlanta has been contained, unlike RFK Jr.’s skepticism

“Good nutrition remains the best defense against most chronic and infectious illnesses,” wrote Kennedy in a Monday op-ed for Fox News. “Vitamins A, C, and D, and foods rich in vitamins B12, C, and E should be part of a balanced diet.”

In Georgia, state health officials said confirmed measles cases have been limited to three members of an unvaccinated family. To help prevent those cases from spreading, public health workers identified more than 300 people across 20 counties who were exposed to the contagious person. The individuals were asked to report symptoms for 21 days, said Gwinnett County epidemiology program manager Keisha Francis-Christian. If they didn’t call, health workers called them, she said.

When I heard that HHS was shipping vitamin A to Texas along with doses of the measles vaccine, I thought back to my childhood. In our house, cod liver oil and castor oil were the equivalent of Gus Portokalos’ Windex or Chris Rock’s Robitussin.

When my sister got the chickenpox, my mother made us play together in the garage for hours to expose me to the disease and build natural immunity. But, that was long before 1995, when the U.S. added chickenpox to the recommended childhood vaccine schedule.

As public health research evolved, so did my mother’s approach to vaccines. Like most kids of my era, I got the recommended vaccines with one exception — she skipped smallpox because the disease was nearly eradicated by the time I was born, and she didn’t want me to have the telltale scar that the vaccine left behind.

Vaccine mandates for school-age children date back to 1855 when Massachusetts became the first state to require children to have a smallpox vaccine before attending school. Vaccine hesitancy and denial have always existed in the U.S., and those movements have tended to take root among generations that have had little contact with victims of disease outbreaks.

Living through the COVID-19 pandemic might have pushed us to embrace vaccines but instead, it brought a fresh wave of Americans into the vaccine-hesitancy fold who might not be fundamentally opposed to vaccines but who have questions about them and don’t trust the traditional institutions to provide answers. Their concerns include the potential for serious adverse effects, government overreach in public health and a general mistrust of science.

I get it, but I also know that fear and hesitancy can be overcome even in the most catastrophic circumstances.

In 1999, my best friend took her infant daughter for a routine immunization. She was driving home from the doctor’s office when she looked in the rearview mirror and saw that her daughter had turned blue. She wasn’t breathing. At the hospital, doctors informed her that her child was among the 1 in 1 million to experience a serious allergic reaction to the DTaP vaccine. Her daughter, who is now 25 years old, has cerebral palsy from the lack of oxygen to her brain caused by anaphylaxis.

If anyone would have a reason to shun vaccines, it would be my friend. And yet, she doesn’t believe vaccines are bad. She intimately understands the risks but also knows vaccines are intended for the public good and that we have a responsibility to each other to do everything we can to limit the spread, and sometimes eradicate, infectious disease.

Her viewpoint is a sharp contrast to a mother in Seminole, Texas, whose 7-year-old unvaccinated son recently recovered from measles.

“We’re not going to harm our children or (risk) the potential to harm our children, so that we can save yours,” she told The Washington Post.

In his comments, Kennedy noted that the decision to vaccinate is a personal choice — and he is correct — but he was less emphatic in expressing how much those personal choices impact all of us.

Kennedy has vowed to investigate vaccines by convening a commission of Cabinet members and other officials to develop a strategy around children’s health within the next six months, according to a report in The New York Times.

The commission, he said in his address to HHS employees, will explore issues that “were formerly taboo or insufficiently scrutinized.” He also said he was willing to be wrong.

I look forward to this “search for existential truth with no political impediments and no preconceptions” that Kennedy has promised to the American people.

For now, I am sufficiently skeptical that he will deliver.

Read more on the Real Life blog (AJC.com/opinion/real-life-blog/), find Nedra on Facebook (facebook.com/AJCRealLifeColumn) and X (@nrhoneajc) or email her at nedra.rhone@ajc.com.