Pennsylvania records first measles deaths in 35 years as Shapiro and Kennedy clash

Pennsylvania has recorded its first measles-associated deaths in 35 years. They are also the first measles-linked fatalities reported in the United States in 2026. Both people lived in Lancaster County and were unvaccinated. One was a newborn.

The state's Department of Health announced the deaths on Tuesday. Health Secretary Debra Bogen said she had reviewed the case files and could confirm two recent measles-associated deaths. She said the department notified the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's measles response team early that morning, before the public briefing.

Lancaster County Coroner Stephen Diamantoni, a Republican elected official, gave a narrower account of the infant. He told the Philadelphia Inquirer that a test on lung tissue after death showed a measles infection acquired before birth. A forensic pathologist, he said, concluded that the immediate cause of death was a lacerated spleen and did not treat measles as the cause. The infant's mother also tested positive.

Neil Ruhland, a department spokesman, said a measles infection can enlarge the spleen and make it more likely to tear. That is the medical bridge the state is using. The department's phrase is measles-associated death. It is the same wording used when a person dies with epidemiologic evidence of measles even if a coroner lists another immediate cause.

The argument moved from the morgue to national politics within a day. Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, accused Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of feeding the outbreak by spreading false claims about the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. Shapiro said their phone call on Tuesday was blunt and asked Kennedy to tell people to get vaccinated.

Kennedy answered on X. He said the deaths may have been fabricated by a member of the governor's staff. He compared the briefing to pandemic-era tactics. He also told Shapiro that some Americans object to the MMR vaccine on religious grounds because, he said, it contains fetal tissue. The American Academy of Pediatrics has rejected that description of current MMR products.

Bogen posted that the two deaths had already been reported to the CDC. By Thursday the CDC said it was working to determine what actually occurred and praised Kennedy's effort to clarify conflicting information. That sentence put the federal health agency on the secretary's side of a dispute with a state health department that had already filed the cases.

Lancaster County has carried most of Pennsylvania's burden. Of 393 cases in the state earlier in the week, 185 were in the county. Later tallies put Pennsylvania at about 424 confirmed cases, with 73 hospitalised. Officials said none of the people who fell ill were fully vaccinated. The county is home to large Amish and Mennonite communities with historically low uptake of MMR.

Nationally the United States has counted nearly 2,800 measles cases in 2026, the highest annual total since 1991. In 2025 there were three measles-associated deaths, the first in the country since 2015.

Jeffrey Martin, a physician at Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health, spoke at the Tuesday briefing held at Women and Babies Hospital. He said the deaths show measles is not a mild childhood illness and that pregnancy raises the stakes. State officials withheld names and further clinical detail, citing privacy.

Anti-vaccine groups have tried to identify the families. The Guardian reported activists seeking relatives of the two dead. That hunt sits outside any official inquiry and adds a safety problem for the households involved.

The concrete question left for clinicians is classification. A coroner records the immediate mechanism. A health department records the infection that set the mechanism in motion. A lacerated spleen in a measles-positive newborn can be both things at once. Kennedy's fabrication charge does not resolve that. Neither does a press conference. What the files show, according to Bogen, is two unvaccinated people in one county, measles in the record, and two deaths. The CDC now has to say whether it will accept the state's associated label or adopt the coroner's narrower line.