I am hopeful that the reason Trump-propagandist extraordinaire Sean Hannity hosted Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Tuesday night was because his unscientific, anti-vaxx views are not faring well as the measles outbreak grows. It has now reached at least 223 cases in Texas, alone.

Media Matters’ Matt Gertz has an excellent analysis of Hannity’s heroic efforts to make his Bedtime BFF’s appointment of Kennedy look like a not-terrible move. “Hannity tried to keep Kennedy on message during their Fox interview, repeatedly prompting the secretary to talk about how the Trump administration is providing vaccines in response to the outbreak. But the loyal Trump propagandist’s efforts were unsuccessful, with Kennedy repeatedly pivoting back to antivax talking points,” Gertz wrote.

For example, Hannity disingenuously suggested that this year’s measles outbreak is nothing out of the ordinary (in fact, this year is on track to outpace all of 2024 and we are not even three months into 2025, Gertz noted). But Kennedy couldn’t seem to help himself from blaming vaccines, instead of anti-vaxxism, which real experts point to as the cause of the 2025 outbreak. Far worse, he suggested we'd all be better off getting measles instead of the vaccine.

KENNEDY: We have measles outbreaks every year, and you know, part of that is that there are people who don't vaccinate, but also the vaccine itself wanes. The vaccine wanes about 4.5% per year. So that means older people are essentially unvaccinated. They aren't - their immune system is not protected, and one of the problems is that tends to shift measles infections to older groups and also to very young children.

So you know if you get it, used to be when you and I were kids, everybody got measles, and measles gave you protected lifetime protection against measles infection. The vaccine doesn't do that. The vaccine is effective for some people for life, but for many people it wanes. And one of the problems is it does not appear to provide maternal immunity.

It used to be a very young kid - you don't want a one-year-old kid getting measles. That's very dangerous. They were protected by breast milk and by maternal immunity, and women who get vaccinated do not provide that level of maternal immunity that the natural measles infection did. So you're now seeing measles hit very, very young kids and hitting older people within whom the vaccine has waned, and that is something that we need to worry about and we're looking at at HHS.

As Gertz also pointed out, “only five of the 223 Texas measles cases and one of the 33 in New Mexico said they had received at least one dose of the vaccine. Of the Texas cases, 98 were in children ages 5 to 17.”

Instead of correcting Kennedy’s dangerous misinformation, Hannity immediately pivoted to making the Trump-quack look good. “First of all, Governor Abbott was singing your praises, talking about you going all in, you providing the vaccines,” Hannity said in response.

Kennedy pivoted to promoting the “87% of effectiveness” of Vitamin A. Then he suggested that getting the measles is no biggie because “it does not have a high-infection fatality rate and the people who tended to die were people who had comorbidities and they were malnourished, which is less of a problem [now].”

This man is a threat to our national health. Hannity surely knows that. But he cared more about making his Beloved Trump look good, or at least less dangerously foolish, than in making sure Americans get correct, life-saving information.