4 Dead From Measles in PA While RFK Jr. Calls Deaths 'Fabricated'

The Four People Who Are Actually Dead

Let's start with what happened, because the facts here are doing more work than any editorial voice ever could.

According to NBC News, the Mifflin County coroner confirmed Tuesday that an 18-year-old resident died from a rare and severe neurological condition — inflammation of the brain — caused by measles. The Jefferson County death was a 40-year-old woman with asthma and severe lung disease who died Saturday. Both were unvaccinated, Pennsylvania's health department said.

The two earlier deaths were infants in Lancaster County: a 6-week-old baby and a newborn whose mother had measles during pregnancy. The first dose of the MMR vaccine isn't given until around age 1, so neither infant had any chance of being protected. They were too young. The virus found them anyway.

These are the first measles deaths in Pennsylvania in 35 years. All four happened within the last month. Nearly 700 measles cases have been reported in the state this year, with 133 people hospitalized, NBC News reports.

RFK Jr. Decided to Call It a Hoax

When the infant deaths in Lancaster County first surfaced last month, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did not express condolences. He did not order an emergency public health response. He suggested the deaths may have been "fabricated" and accused Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro of trying to profit from them politically. NBC News has been covering this back-and-forth extensively.

Let that sit for a second. Two dead infants. The sitting Health Secretary of the United States floated the idea that the deaths were made up.

Sharipo shot back by accusing Kennedy of spreading falsehoods about vaccines. Kennedy's response was to lean further into the conspiracy framing, which is a thing that is happening in real life, in the year 2026, with actual dead children as the backdrop.

This is the same playbook anti-vaccine activists have used for years: if someone died with measles but had any secondary complication, claim the measles didn't really do it. Doctors, for what it's worth, say that's not how underlying causes of death work. If you would not have died without the measles infection, measles is what killed you.

The CDC Is Sitting This One Out, Apparently

Here is where the story gets an extra layer of broken. The CDC has not confirmed any of the Pennsylvania deaths. Its website currently states it has no 2026 death records showing measles as the underlying cause. NBC News reports this represents "a significant departure from the way the agency has operated in the past" — traditionally, the CDC accepts these reports directly from state health departments.

CDC Director Erica Schwartz said Monday that Pennsylvania, unlike other states dealing with measles outbreaks, had not formally requested CDC assistance. Pennsylvania's health department pushed back on that framing, saying it "maintains a strong working relationship with the professional staff at the CDC" and submits death records to the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics daily — including records for these exact deaths.

So either the CDC is receiving the data and choosing not to act on it, or something is going wrong in a system that has reliably worked for decades. Either answer is a problem. Nationally, the CDC has confirmed 3,294 measles cases and 267 hospitalizations as of September 10, per NBC News. But those four deaths in Pennsylvania? Officially, according to the federal government: doesn't see them.

How We Got Here: Falling Vaccination Rates

State officials in Pennsylvania have directly tied the outbreak to falling vaccination rates. This is not complicated epidemiology. Measles was effectively eliminated in the United States in 2000. Two doses of the MMR vaccine offer 97% protection, usually for life. The math on herd immunity is not ambiguous.

But vaccination rates have been sliding for years, accelerated by a decade of sustained anti-vaccine messaging that now has a prominent seat at the Cabinet table. The communities hit hardest in Pennsylvania's outbreak are those with lower vaccination coverage.

The newborn who died had a mother who contracted measles during pregnancy. Premature birth is a known complication of measles in pregnant women, NBC News notes. The baby was born prematurely. The baby died. Measles virus was found in the infant's lung tissue. If you are searching for a cleaner line of cause and effect, you are not going to find one.

The Misinformation Is Running Alongside the Virus

After the Lancaster County infant deaths, NBC News reported a flood of misinformation online claiming the deaths were exaggerated or misattributed. The coroner's finding that the newborn's official cause of death was internal hemorrhage and a "traumatic rupture" of the spleen — rather than measles directly — gave anti-vaccine advocates a talking point they immediately weaponized.

The full picture, though, is this: measles can cause the spleen to enlarge, raising the risk of exactly that kind of rupture. The baby's mother had measles. The baby was born prematurely as a likely result. Measles virus was in the lung tissue. The Lancaster County coroner himself said he believes measles was the direct cause of death for the 6-week-old. The newborn case is more medically complex, but the father told NBC News the baby was premature and that the mother had measles.

And yet, the Health Secretary of the United States used that complexity as cover to suggest the whole thing was politically manufactured. This is what it looks like when public health infrastructure is handed to someone who does not believe in the foundational premises of public health.