Measles “Cures”: Vitamin C, Vitamin A and Cod Liver Oil
If measles is mild, a vitamin can handle it. That is the sales pitch. But measles can kill a child years after the rash is gone, and no vitamin prevents that. Here is where the vitamin cures came from, who is selling them now, and what happened when parents listened.
Figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the California SSPE study below.
1. The death that comes years later
Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) is a brain disease caused by measles virus that stays hidden in the brain after the child seems to have recovered. It usually appears 2 to 10 years later. The child loses school skills, then movement, then consciousness. There is no treatment, and it is always fatal, usually within 1 to 3 years of diagnosis.
How common is SSPE?
- The old textbook figure was about 1 in 100,000 measles cases. It was far too low.
- California, 1998–2016: a study of 17 SSPE cases found the risk was 1 in 1,367 for children who caught measles before age 5, and 1 in 609 for babies who caught it before their first birthday. All 17 had measles before they were vaccinated.
- Germany, 2003–2009: researchers estimated roughly 1 in 1,700 to 1 in 3,300 for children infected before age 5.
- Los Angeles, September 2025: a school-aged child died of SSPE. The child had caught measles as a baby, too young to be vaccinated, and had recovered.
Measles also causes “immune amnesia”: it wipes out part of the immune system’s memory of other infections, leaving children open to them for two to three years. See The Bonus and What These Diseases Do.
2. Where the vitamin C “cure” came from
Nearly every vitamin C claim for measles goes back to one man: Frederick Klenner, a family doctor in Reidsville, North Carolina. In July 1949 he published “The Treatment of Poliomyelitis and Other Virus Diseases with Vitamin C” in Southern Medicine & Surgery.
Seventy-five years later, Klenner’s papers are still reprinted on vitamin C websites and in books such as Thomas Levy’s Curing the Incurable. Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk draw on the same 1940s reports in Dissolving Illusions. No controlled trial has ever shown that vitamin C prevents or treats measles.
3. Suzanne Humphries: IV vitamin C for children with measles
Suzanne Humphries, MD, is an internist and former nephrologist (kidney specialist) and co-author of Dissolving Illusions. She is one of the best-known doctors in the anti-vaccine movement.
- Joe Rogan Experience, episode 2294 (March 2025): she called vitamin C an antiviral and said it should be given to every hospital patient on admission. When Rogan said people should take vitamin A after a measles shot, she agreed. There is no evidence that the vaccine depletes vitamin A.
- With the Wind with Dr. Paul, show 201 (13 May 2026): the show’s own notes say she talked about oral and intravenous vitamin C for measles, and described “treating dozens of measles cases during a 2019 outbreak,” including a severely ill 11-year-old.
The host, Paul Thomas, is a former Portland, Oregon, pediatrician. The Oregon Medical Board suspended his licence in December 2020, and he surrendered it in October 2022 after findings of gross negligence involving the care of seven children.
Her licences: what the medical boards show
- Virginia: licence 0101255109, first issued 8 October 2013, current and active to 31 May 2028. Her Virginia Board of Medicine profile, which she last updated on 10 April 2026, lists no practice address and no hospital affiliation.
- Maine: licence MD15655, first issued 27 July 2001. It lapsed on 31 May 2022, when she did not renew it.
- Discipline: none. Neither board has taken any action against her, and the Federation of State Medical Boards’ DocInfo lists no actions in any state.
- Board certification: internal medicine. By her own report, her certification in nephrology ran from 1998 until it expired in 2017.
- Training: Temple University School of Medicine, 1993; internal medicine residency at Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, 1996.
Sources: Virginia Board of Medicine practitioner profile (printed 4 Nov 2026); Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine licence record; DocInfo.org. The Virginia profile’s practice details are self-reported by the doctor.
- Where was she practising in 2019, and was she licensed there? She trained in internal medicine and kidney disease, not pediatrics.
- Were the “dozens” of cases confirmed by a lab test and reported? Measles is a reportable disease in every U.S. state and Canadian province.
- Why was a severely ill 11-year-old given an IV in an office instead of being sent to hospital? Severe measles can mean pneumonia or encephalitis.
- What happened to the others? Most children recover from measles on their own within about a week, which makes a recovery story meaningless without the full count.
- What about SSPE? Some of those children may still be at risk years from now. No vitamin prevents it.
High-dose IV vitamin C is not harmless. It can cause kidney damage from oxalate crystals, a risk a kidney specialist should know well. It can also destroy red blood cells in children with G6PD deficiency, a common inherited condition.
This section is based on the show’s published notes. QuackeryWatch has not heard a full transcript, which is behind a paywall. Dr. Humphries is welcome to send details of where and when she treated these patients.
Read the doctor who answered them. Paul Offit’s Deadly Choices tells how the anti-vaccine movement put children at risk.Amazon.ca affiliate link: QuackeryWatch earns a small commission at no cost to you.
4. Samoa, 2019: vitamin C during an epidemic
In 2018, after two babies died when nurses mixed the MMR vaccine with the wrong liquid, Samoa suspended its vaccination program for ten months. Infant measles vaccination fell from about 74% in 2017 to roughly a third in 2018. Measles arrived in late 2019.
The Samoa epidemic
- 5,707 cases and 83 deaths in a country of about 200,000 people.
- Most of the dead were small children: 61 of the first 70 deaths were aged four or under.
- Edwin Tamasese, an activist with no medical training, posted on Facebook that vitamin C would cure measles and “will save your kids.”
- He was arrested in December 2019 and charged with incitement against the government’s vaccination order.
5. Texas, 2025: vitamin A and cod liver oil
The 2025 West Texas outbreak started in late January in a mostly unvaccinated community. By the time it was declared over on 18 August, there had been 762 confirmed cases in Texas and two unvaccinated children had died.
- In early March, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promoted vitamin A for measles, and on 4 March he said cod liver oil was “working” for patients. West Texas pharmacies reported a run on cod liver oil.
- Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock treated fewer than 10 children who had severe measles and also had vitamin A levels high enough to damage their livers.
- A Boston Children’s Hospital study in JAMA Network Open found that U.S. searches for vitamin A and measles jumped after Kennedy’s statements, and again after the Humphries–Rogan episode.
- America’s Poison Centers reported a 38.7% rise in children’s vitamin A exposures in April 2025 compared with April 2024.
6. What vitamin A really does, and doesn’t do
This is where the sales pitch borrows from real medicine.
7. The claims at a glance
← Swipe the table sideways →
| Claim | Who says it | What the evidence shows |
|---|---|---|
| Vitamin C cures or prevents measles | Klenner (1949); Thomas Levy; Humphries and Bystrianyk; Tamasese in Samoa | No controlled trial has ever shown it. Klenner’s reports had no comparison group. |
| IV vitamin C turned a severely ill child around in an hour | Humphries (2026 podcast, 2019 cases) | An anecdote with no published details. Most children recover from measles within about a week anyway. |
| Cod liver oil is “working” | Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (March 2025) | No evidence. Children in Lubbock were treated for vitamin A toxicity during the outbreak. |
| The measles shot depletes vitamin A | Joe Rogan, with Humphries agreeing (March 2025) | No evidence. Measles infection lowers vitamin A; the vaccine does not. |
| Measles is a mild childhood illness | Most anti-vaccine sources | 1 in 5 unvaccinated U.S. cases are hospitalized; 1–3 in 1,000 children die; up to 1 in 609 babies later die of SSPE. |
A pediatrician’s note
My first patient as a medical student at Children’s Hospital of Michigan in 1968 was a child in a coma from measles encephalitis. In those years I also saw SSPE. — Terry Polevoy, MD, FRCPC
Sources
- U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Measles: It Isn’t Just a Little Rash” and “Complications of Measles.”
- Wendorf KA et al., SSPE in California, 1998–2016 (IDWeek 2016; Clinical Infectious Diseases, 2017); EurekAlert news release.
- Schönberger K et al., “Epidemiology of Subacute Sclerosing Panencephalitis (SSPE) in Germany from 2003 to 2009: A Risk Estimation,” PLoS ONE, 2013.
- CBS Los Angeles, “Los Angeles County child dies from complications caused by measles infection,” September 2025.
- Klenner FR, “The Treatment of Poliomyelitis and Other Virus Diseases with Vitamin C,” Southern Medicine & Surgery 111(7):209–214, July 1949.
- Gorski D, “High-dose vitamin C can cure Ebola virus disease? Not so fast,” Respectful Insolence, 5 Sept 2014 (on Klenner’s evidence and oxalate nephropathy).
- The Joe Rogan Experience #2294, Dr. Suzanne Humphries, March 2025 (transcript).
- With the Wind with Dr. Paul, Podcast 201, “Pediatric Perspectives: Dangerous Realities of Modern Medicine with Suzanne Humphries, M.D.,” 13 May 2026, show notes at doctorsandscience.com.
- Willamette Week, 5 Dec 2020 (Oregon Medical Board suspension of Paul Thomas); Oregon Medical Board surrender order, 6 Oct 2022.
- NPR, “Samoa Arrests Anti-Vaccination Activist As Measles Death Toll Rises,” 6 Dec 2019; Radio New Zealand, 29 Dec 2019; “2019 Samoa measles outbreak,” Wikipedia (case and death totals).
- Texas Standard / Texas Newsroom, “West Texas children treated for vitamin A toxicity,” 27–28 Mar 2025.
- CBS News, “Texas declares measles outbreak over,” 18 Aug 2025.
- Boston Children’s Hospital study, JAMA Network Open, 2026, as reported by IFLScience and Gizmodo (searches and poison-centre exposures).
- Huiming Y, Chaomin W, Meng M, “Vitamin A for treating measles in children,” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CD001479).
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