Dr. Oz backtracks on anti-vax bullsh-t as measles cases multiply

With measles cases spiking all across the country, Dr. Mehmet Oz went on CNN to say he really wants you to get the measles vaccine. Really!

Normally, having the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator remind people that vaccines are beneficial would not be notable. However, since Oz, along with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been howling about how vaccines are deadly scams for years now, this is, regrettably, newsworthy. 

So, Oz is now reduced to begging people to get vaccinated for something that, for decades, everyone routinely got vaccinated for.

“Take the vaccine, please. We have a solution for our problem,” he said.

We do indeed, Oz! A solution that worked! But you joined the crew of absolute wreckers at HHS, and you own this. So yes, it’s great that Oz is finally calling for this, but even as he did so, he couldn’t help but still undercut vaccine safety overall. 

“Not all illnesses are equally dangerous and not all people are equally susceptible to those illnesses,” he hedged. “But measles is one you should get your vaccine.”

The ongoing measles outbreak is catastrophically costly and is only going to get worse. One study estimated that the 2025 outbreak in West Texas, which resulted in 762 cases and 99 hospitalizations, cost about $12.6 million. There were 2,276 confirmed measles cases nationwide in 2025, but we already notched 733 new cases by Feb. 5, 2026. That math does not bode well. 

Nor does it bode well that the anti-abortion March for Life, where rabid anti-choicers descended on Washington, D.C. for several days for their usual hard-right jamboree, also appears to be a measles jamboree. 

The problem for Oz is that once you tell people that the experts are lying to you, making an appeal to expertise doesn’t work.

Late last year, Oz popped off over on Newsmax about how the flu vaccine doesn’t work well, and you should just take care of yourself instead. In the fall, he went on Fox News to say that there should not be vaccine mandates, particularly for children, and doctors should not feel “pressure” from the government to tell patients to get vaccinated.

Related | While scientists race to study spread of measles in US, Kennedy unravels hard-won gains

It’s awful tough to pivot from telling people they should never listen to the government or medical experts when it comes to vaccines to “Listen just this one time, please!” 

The other problem Oz has is that while he may have come to a tiny bit of his senses about this, his boss definitely has not. Last April, Kennedy grudgingly said that the vaccine was “the most effective” way to stop the spread of measles, but didn’t see fit to even mention measles at a recent Cabinet meeting. 

Over the weekend, news broke that Kennedy’s 2019 trip to Samoa, which preceded a huge measles outbreak there, was indeed about his concerns about vaccine “safety”—despite his telling Congress during his confirmation hearings that the trip had nothing to do with vaccines.

A U.S. embassy employee facilitated Kennedy’s connection with Samoan officials, so that’s fun. A Samoan official who was the health minister at the time of Kennedy’s trip told NBC News that Kennedy shared his views that vaccines were unsafe.

That’s a peculiar thing to do if Kennedy had been there for his stated reason, which was introducing a medical data system. Ah, yes, thanks to his vast medical data system experience. 

The measles epidemic in Samoa that followed this visit claimed the lives of 83 people, 87% of whom were children under 5. There were 5,697 measles cases in a population of 195,000. So, almost 3% of the population. Terrific job, Bobby.

And that’s the future Kennedy wants: a eugenics nightmare where if you don’t just MAHA your way to health, you deserve to die. Oz knows this, and he signed on for this, and while it is good that he’s making an 11th-hour appeal to reason to head off a Samoa-level outbreak, you do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to him.

rss@dailykos.com (Lisa Needham)مصدر