Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fact-checked Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro after he claimed that there is “no fetal tissue” in the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, known as MMR.
During a Tuesday news conference, Shapiro accused Kennedy of spreading vaccine misinformation and tied it to the deaths of two people in Lancaster County, which he said were “measles-associated,” a claim county officials have since disputed.
In a phone call with Kennedy, the governor recounted, “I was very, very blunt with him and I made very clear that his actions and the rhetoric that’s coming from this administration are having a negative impact on communities across America, particularly right here in Pennsylvania.”
“There’s real life consequences to spreading misinformation. There are real-life consequences to scaring people and not relying on actual doctors and actual medical professionals to provide unbiased information to parents so that we can make reasonable decisions for our kids,” he added.
“Sharing conspiracy theories and misinformation does not help the cause of public health,” Shapiro said.
Kennedy responded with a post on X, writing, “At his press conference today, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro accused me of promoting conspiracy theories because I told him, during an earlier telephone conversation, that some Americans had religious objections to the MMR vaccine because it contained fetal tissue. ‘There is no fetal tissue in the MMR,’ he told me.”
The post included video testimony from Dr. Stanley Plotkin, who developed the rubella component of the MMR vaccine, according to the Smithsonian.
“Plotkin admits to butchering 76 aborted normally developing fetuses, all over three months old, in just one of the many studies that led to the development of his vaccine,” RFK Jr. wrote.
“The rubella virus used in MMR-II is grown on the cultured cell line composed of lung tissue from an aborted three-month-old female embryo and listed as ‘WI-38 human diploid lung fibroblasts’ in the ingredients of MMR-II as portions of these cells end up in each vial of MMR II,” Kennedy added.
Hellbound and Down 