As a measles case hits the Washington, D.C., area, public health agencies led by anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy Jr. are ignoring it and instead wasting resources on testing vaccines for a false and long-debunked association with autism.

A measles outbreak in West Texas began in January, but on Sunday, a case was confirmed in Maryland, with the possibility of further exposure to people at Dulles International Airport and the Johns Hopkins Howard County Medical Center. (The two outbreaks are not believed to be connected.) And officials are still trying to identify who has been exposed, according to The Washington Post.

However, it’s clear we’re not in the safest of hands, at least federally. During President Donald Trump’s Cabinet meeting on Feb. 26, Kennedy claimed the outbreak in Texas and New Mexico was “not unusual”—despite that it has led to the first two deaths from the preventable disease in a decade. Additionally, there have been more than 200 reported cases and 23 hospitalizations due to largely unvaccinated populations, as of March 7.

“There’ve been four measles outbreaks this year. In this country last year, there were 16,” Kennedy said, pushing a false narrative of public health normalcy. “So it’s not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year.”

Instead of focusing on the growing outbreak, Kennedy, a rabid anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist, is using taxpayer dollars to direct the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct needless trials on a disproven link between vaccines and autism. To the chagrin of “crunchy” pseudoscience advocates, numerous studies found no link between vaccines leading to autism.

That hasn’t stopped Trump’s public health goons from continuing to parrot junk-science talking points.

“As President Trump said in his Joint Address to Congress, the rate of autism in American children has skyrocketed. CDC will leave no stone unturned in its mission to figure out what exactly is happening,” a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement to ABC News.

It’s unclear how the study would be conducted, who would take part in it, and how it would be different from numerous previous studies of the same topic.

Public health experts are denouncing the decision. Others are afraid of the impact Kennedy is already having on waning public health trust.

The announcement that CDC will look at potential links between vaccines and autism means that significant federal resources will be diverted from crucial areas of study, including research into the unknown causes of autism, at a time when research funding is already facing deep cuts,” said Tina Tan, president of the Infectious Disease Society of America.

“[Kennedy’s] misleading and often conspiratorial claims have already weakened confidence in public health, a legacy that could have far-reaching and deadly consequences both domestically and globally,” Y. Tony Yang, an associate dean of health policy at George Washington University School of Nursing, wrote in The Lancet. “It is not just the poorest and most vulnerable who will suffer; unvaccinated infants, immunocompromised individuals, and entire communities are at risk.”

Kennedy has already axed the multimillion-dollar effort to study an oral COVID-19 vaccine, and had the Food and Drug Administration cancel a meeting to plan for next season's flu shot. When he isn’t gutting public health agencies or offering workers $25,000 to resign, he’s having the department whiplash his employees by begging them to come back.

As measles spreads, the Trump administration is wasting resources on debunked conspiracies instead of protecting public health—a dangerous gamble with real consequences.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos