The appalling price of prescription drugs is one of perhaps two things Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and I will ever agree on. The other is Froot Loops.
Not that I consume the multicolored breakfast cereal.
It’s inexcusable that the Flathead version of Kellogg’s vivid breakfast treat uses synthetic dyes – Red 40, Blue 1, Yellow 5 and Yellow 6 – whereas just across the border in Fernie the same cereal is served with natural food coloring.
“If you look at a [box] of Froot Loops in this country, it’s all chemical dyes. Yellow, blue, red dye, which are poison,” Kennedy has warned. “In Canada, across the border, Froot Loops are … all colored by [plants and spices like Turmeric]. Kellogg’s knows how to create safer products that don’t have chemicals in them.”
Now, under the new health secretary, the Food and Drug Administration is shifting away from petroleum-based dyes—injected into cereals, yogurt, candy and beverages—in favor of natural food color additives, including a cool shade of blue derived from the butterfly pea flower.
But that’s as far as I tip my hat to the conspiracy-possessed member of the Kennedy family, what with his escalating war on science and, in particular, attack on proven childhood vaccines.
In a previous column I recalled when Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte signed the nation’s first ever vaccine choice legislation. As a result, parents who cite personal, moral or religious beliefs can opt their kids out of Montana’s school vaccine requirements (hundreds of children in the state now do so every year).
Helena’s legislation, or so I opined, was not only a dangerous and unscientific ambush on proven vaccines – measles, mumps and rubella; chickenpox, rotavirus, hepatitis A and B – it was most ironic, given Montana is the birthplace of America’s “father of vaccines.”
Dr. Maurice Hilleman, born and raised on a farm near Miles City, developed eight of the 14 vaccines still routinely administered in America’s immunization schedule: measles and mumps to hepatitis A and B. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan awarded Hilleman, now deceased, the prestigious National Medal of Science for having saved the lives of tens of millions of Americans.
On the same front lines of medicine today we find Dr. Atty Moriarty, president of the Montana Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. A pediatric hospitalist in Missoula, she grew up in the Flathead Valley, spending her summers exploring Glacier and her winters nordic skiing.
She was your typical (read healthy) Flathead kid, in other words.
But that once robust Montana landscape is changing, and not for the better. Consider until a few weeks ago that Montana had not experienced a case of measles in 35 years.
“There were initially five cases detected in Gallatin County from people that had traveled outside of the state, and then three additional cases that were detected because they came in contact with those initial five,” Dr. Moriarty recalls in an interview.
“Everybody has been quarantined, so we’re not seeing community-wide spread right now,” she stresses. “But the caveat to that is that as a public health community we are bracing for tourist season in Montana and are expecting more cases.”
Because of the growing number of Montana children not getting vaccinated, I ask?
“Yes, since Covid we have seen a decrease in childhood vaccinations overall,” the doctor confirms.
How worried does that make you?
“Really worried,” she replies. “In my job as a pediatric hospitalist I don’t see kids in the office. I see really sick kids come in who shouldn’t be out in the community. They’re too sick, so they get hospitalized. I’ve seen vaccine preventable disease before … and it is awful, it’s awful.
“Our top three respiratory illnesses that kids are hospitalized for – RSV, Covid and flu – we have vaccines for that,” she continues. “And we also had our most deadly flu season on record this last year. So measles is an exciting thing to talk about, but run of the mill things we see every year, like flu – less and less people are getting immunized for flu – we’re seeing more and more deaths because of that.
“So yeah, its scary. As a pediatric community we’re all bracing ourselves and educating ourselves for how we treat these diseases, how we continue to talk to families about getting vaccinated, and how we move forward and protect our communities.”
Following this year’s major outbreak of measles in Texas, Kennedy had no choice but to agree that parents should consider vaccinating their children against the highly contagious disease.
Still, he’s warned that the measles vaccine introduced in 1963 (once in the immunization schedule measles cases in this country dropped by nearly 98 percent, until the disease was declared eliminated in 2000) “wanes very quickly” and was never “safety tested.”
Dr. Paul Offit, director of the vaccine center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, countered that two doses of MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) does offer “lifelong” protection. And if immunity did in fact wane, as Kennedy has claimed, measles would never have been wiped out.
Were I the parent of a youngster today I’d trust Montana’s doctors over politicians in Helena and Washington. Even the health secretary would tell you that.
“I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me,” Kennedy acknowledged when discussing childhood vaccines on Capitol Hill last week.
“I think that we [as a medical community] tend to think about all of the bad things that can happen from disease,” says Dr. Moriarty. “But really pediatricians are hopeful that your kids will grow up to be healthy and strong, and learn to ride bikes and swim in the creeks, and do all of these things that we love to do in Montana.
“We’re not trying to scare you, we are just trying to keep you just as healthy as if you were one of our own kids.”
John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author who lives in Bigfork.