Anti-vaccine activists are trying to track down the families of two people, including at least one newborn, who died after contracting measles in Pennsylvania, as Governor Josh Shapiro tangles with Robert F Kennedy Jr over his “inaccurate and misleading claims”. Kennedy, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), suggested late on Wednesday that the deaths in the state may have been “fabricated” after a Republican coroner – an elected political office in Lancaster county – claimed one of the measles-associated deaths was unrelated to the virus, although the given cause would be consistent with measles. Brian Hooker at Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine organization that until recently was led by Kennedy, said in a recent video that the organization is “trying to get boots on the ground” and “do outreach” in Pennsylvania.
Kennedy is “an anti-vaccine activist in the role of the most powerful public health person in this country”, said Paul Offit, an infectious diseases physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. The HHS did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about whether Kennedy recommends the vaccine or whether the newly confirmed CDC director, Erica Schwartz, would make a statement about the outbreak and the need for vaccination. About 424 Pennsylvanians have confirmed measles cases, and 73 have been hospitalized.
None of the sickened people are fully vaccinated. The two deaths were in unvaccinated patients in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, which is home to large Amish and Mennonite communities. While these communities do not have religious objections to vaccines, they eschew many parts of modern life, and thus are relatively disconnected from modern healthcare.
Few other details have been released about the patients, fueling a firestorm of misinformation from anti-vaccine activists spreading conspiracy theories about vaccines, which are 97% effective at preventing measles. The anti-vaccine activists are attempting to figure out who died so they can reach the families, as they did in Texas when a six-year-old girl died last year, Hooker said. They filmed a misinformation-filled interview with the Mennonite parents in a rare media appearance after their daughter’s death.
Hooker also speculated that the Pennsylvania announcement was a political ploy in advance of the US midterm elections, claiming it was “a strategic move” to “get measles deaths on the tip of everybody’s tongue, to get in the forefront”. The Trump administration has at times attempted to downplay its anti-vaccine moves because they are not popular with voters, according to internal polling. When Shapiro first announced the deaths, he pointed to the inaccurate claims from the highest levels of the US government, saying at a press conference: “There’s real-life consequences to spreading misinformation.” Kennedy responded on X with debunked myths about the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
Shapiro called those claims “inaccurate and misleading” in his own X post. When Kennedy offered to help after the announcement of the two deaths, Shapiro asked him to encourage vaccination and stop spreading misinformation, the governor said in the post. The health secretary responded by repeating vaccine misinformation and saying “it would be better if we went back to ‘natural measles’,” Shapiro wrote.
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