08/30/2026
Politics again?
Pennsylvania announced this week what it called the first two “measles-associated deaths” in the Commonwealth in 35 years. Within hours, those carefully chosen words were disappearing. NBC News told readers that two unvaccinated people had “die[d] of measles.” Other news organizations similarly reported that people had died “from” or “of” measles. Governor Josh Shapiro quickly turned the deaths into an attack on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., accusing Kennedy and the Trump administration of spreading misinformation with “real-life consequences.” There was just one rather important problem with this extraordinarily convenient narrative: Pennsylvania itself had not established that either person died from measles.
That is not my interpretation of some obscure epidemiological distinction. It comes directly from the Pennsylvania Department of Health. Department press secretary Neil Ruhland explained that the state uses the term “measles-associated” when laboratory or epidemiological evidence of measles is present, but the official cause of death remains under investigation. In other words, at the time Pennsylvania announced two historic measles-associated deaths, the official causes of those deaths had apparently not yet been determined.
The story becomes considerably stranger when one turns from Harrisburg to Lancaster County itself. Lancaster County Coroner Dr. Stephen Diamantoni told LancasterOnline that his office had handled no measles deaths. Parsons subsequently contacted the coroner’s office and reported that it had “zero” cases in which measles was the immediate cause of death and one case involving someone who died with measles but not from it.
Another piece of historical context is almost entirely absent from the current coverage. Before the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963, measles was extraordinarily common in the United States, but by that point it was rarely fatal. CDC estimates that during the decade before vaccination became available, 3 to 4 million Americans contracted measles each year, approximately 48,000 were hospitalized, and 400 to 500 died. Using those estimates, roughly 1.2 to 1.6 percent of infections resulted in hospitalization, while approximately 0.01 to 0.017 percent resulted in death. Put into more understandable terms, approximately one person died for every 6,000 to 10,000 people infected, while roughly one in 60 to 80 was hospitalized.
For another comparison, consider influenza. During the severe 2024–25 influenza season, CDC estimates that approximately 51 million Americans became ill, 710,000 were hospitalized, and 45,000 died. That produces an estimated hospitalization rate of about 1.39 percent, strikingly close to the roughly 1.2 to 1.6 percent calculated from CDC’s pre-vaccine measles estimates. But the estimated mortality rate for that flu season was approximately 0.088 percent, compared with roughly 0.01 to 0.017 percent for measles in the decade before vaccination. On those estimates, the risk of death per illness during the severe 2024–25 flu season was roughly five to nine times higher than the risk of death per measles infection in pre-vaccine America.
For more of the story, go here:
Did they or didn’t they die of measles?
