Two unvaccinated people in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, have died from measles, the state Department of Health announced Tuesday.
The people, whose ages were not released by officials, citing privacy concerns, were the first measles-related deaths in Pennsylvania in 35 years. There have been 393 cases confirmed in the state this year and 70 people have been hospitalized from the viral disease, according to the Health Department.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has not commented publicly on the deaths, but he has spoken about measles in Lancaster County before. In 2021, then-chair of the anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy visited an Amish country fair in Lancaster, where he praised the low childhood vaccine uptake, downplayed the severity of measles, said Big Pharma was “selling the remedies for the chronic diseases that are coming from the vaccines” and warned that the government was “coming for the Amish.”
“I am a measles survivor,” he sarcastically told the crowd, to laughs and applause. “It was extraordinarily lucky. Very, very lucky to have lived through that nightmare because we had to stay at home and watch TV the whole week with all of my brothers and sisters. It was horrible.”
“What is the cure for measles? Cure for measles is chicken soup and vitamin A, and neither of those things can be patented,” he said. (The American Academy of Pediatrics and extensive scientific research dispute this.)
Kennedy falsely said pharmaceutical companies ignored — or hid — the harms from the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine to make “permanent customers” of children who were injured by the shots.
“If you give 1 out of every 300 of those kids seizure disorders and 1 out of every 1,000 of them lifetime epilepsy, you now have permanent customers that are buying really high-priced drugs for life,” Kennedy said. “And if you can spread those risks out among 84 million kids who are getting the vaccines, you’ve now created guaranteed profits for your company that are going to go on forever.”
Kennedy said a Lancaster doctor had told his anti-vaccine group that autism didn’t occur among the area’s Amish population (also false), and claimed the federal health agencies wanted to suppress that information.
“The Amish are our control group, and [the CDC] cannot stand it,” Kennedy said.
“Those agencies are going to do everything in their power to make the Amish vaccinate,” he said. “Everything they can do. It is a thorn in their side that there is a group of people in this country who are not chronically ill, and who people like myself can point to them and say, ‘What about the Amish?’”
Kennedy ended with a warning: “To all of you people who are Amish in here today, they are coming for you because they cannot stand the fact that you are healthy.”
Kennedy has, for more than a decade, spread false claims about measles and the vaccine that offers 97% protection against the disease. The second Trump administration has been marred by its response to the nation’s worst measles outbreaks in decades. In a year in which 2,777 measles cases have been reported so far and parents are increasingly forgoing vaccines for their children, Kennedy has decimated vaccine advisory groups, cut funding for promising vaccine technology, backed investigations of vaccines by discredited researchers and supported Trump’s false claims, including an executive order limiting the number of childhood vaccines and calling for changes to the safe MMR vaccine that pediatricians and public health experts say will only make it harder and more costly to get kids vaccinated against measles.
At a Tuesday news conference, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said he had declined Kennedy’s offer of support.
“I was very, very blunt with him, and I made very clear that his actions and the rhetoric that’s coming from this administration are having a negative impact on communities across America, particularly right here in Pennsylvania.”
HHS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not respond to MS NOW’s requests for comment.
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