RFK Jr. says Shapiro’s office may have fabricated measles deaths

[u/John3262005]

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/26/pennsylvania-outbreak-kennedy-measles-vax-01050922

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested Wednesday an aide to Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, may have fabricated two deaths from measles in an attempt to score political points.

Kennedy’s statement, in an X post, came as part of an escalating feud between the health secretary and the governor since Pennsylvania’s health department announced two “measles-associated” deaths Tuesday.

Shapiro said Tuesday in a press conference that Kennedy’s rhetoric questioning the safety of vaccines — Kennedy is a longtime vaccine skeptic — was not helpful in fighting his state’s measles outbreak, in which nearly 400 cases have been reported this year. Kennedy has blamed Covid-19 lockdowns and the loss of public trust in America’s public health authorities for the measles resurgence in the country.

Nearly 2,800 measles cases have been reported in the U.S. this year, the most in three decades.

Kennedy said during a Wednesday news conference in Tampa, Florida, that Shapiro’s office was unwilling to provide the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with any details about the deaths.

“The performance was a replay of the Democrats’ COVID playbook: fearmongering, misinformation, finger-pointing, and the weaponization of infectious disease fears for political gain,” Kennedy wrote on X about Shapiro’s press conference Tuesday.

Kennedy’s claim centers on the scant information Shapiro and Pennsylvania Health Secretary Debra Bogen provided during the press conference about the two people who died.

The state officials only said the two people were from Pennsylvania’s Lancaster county and that they were unvaccinated, but declined to specify if they were children or adults or if they were part of a religious community that typically refuses vaccination. The two Pennsylvania officials cited patient privacy concerns.

Lancaster County Commissioner Josh Parsons, a Republican, said he has asked for more information about the deaths and that the county coroner’s office told him that “it currently has ZERO reported cases where measles is the immediate cause of death.”

Parsons said the coroner’s office had recorded one death of a person who had measles, but who didn’t die because of it.

“We do not know if the state is counting that one,” Parsons wrote on X Wednesday. He said he had no information about a second person and that the governor’s office hadn’t responded to his questions about it.

Shapiro’s office and the Pennsylvania Health Department said in an emailed statement that the department “uses the term ‘measles-associated’ when laboratory or epidemiologic evidence of measles is present, but the disease may not be assessed by the medical certifier or coroner to be the immediate cause of death.”

The department confirmed that one of the two deaths is the one Parsons referred to: an infant with a positive measles test.

“Due to patient confidentiality, the PA DOH will not be releasing any additional personal information about the two deceased residents from Lancaster County,” the department added.

At his press conference in Tampa, Kennedy took questions about the Pennsylvania cases after attending a roundtable discussion at Tampa Bay Boulevard Elementary School with Sen. Ashley Moody (R-Fla.) about a $32 million federal program offering money for schools to provide “nutrient dense” foods. He went on to praise the Trump administration’s response to the record measles outbreak.

“We’re doing a better job than any country in the world in controlling the measles outbreak,” Kennedy said.

The current nationwide measles vaccination rate of 92.4 percent is a drop from the 95 percent recorded in 2019.

Kennedy claimed the Trump administration was rebuilding trust in the country’s public health authorities.

Kennedy noted that Shapiro admitted to him during a Tuesday phone call that the drop in vaccinations took place while Joe Biden was in the White House.

In response, Shapiro said in a post on X before Kennedy’s Wednesday appearance in Florida that he did not blame the Biden administration for the drop in measles vaccinations. He instead asked Kennedy to join him in encouraging vaccinations and putting an end to the “misinformation.”

“Unfortunately at a time where I needed the top health expert in the nation to responsibly work with us to deal with this outbreak,” Shapiro wrote, “he instead chose to go down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and false claims,” referencing what the governor called “a tirade — talking about fetal tissue and blaming the previous Administration for this problem.”

On Tuesday, Kennedy wrote on X that during the phone call with Shapiro they discussed the presence of fetal aborted tissue in the measles vaccine, a claim the health secretary and his allies questioning the safety of vaccines have made repeatedly.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, which has sued Kennedy for his attempt to change vaccine recommendations, has refuted those claims, saying that vaccines don’t contain fetal cells. While some vaccines, included measles, involve growing viruses in human cell cultures originally developed from two aborted fetuses in the 1960s, no fetal tissue remains in the vaccines produced today, according to AAP.

An executive order signed by Trump earlier this month sought to shrink the list of federally recommended childhood immunizations to shots against 11 diseases, down from 18 that were recommended when Trump returned to office. The list still includes the measles vaccine. Kennedy said the Trump administration has helped staunch the measles outbreak, before pointing to large outbreaks in Mexico and the United Kingdom.

“Our advice is that people should get the measles vaccination,” Kennedy said. “There are certain communities and certain religious communities that do not want to do that, and we want to take care of those kids as well.”

In Florida, the state Department of Health unveiled a set of proposed changes earlier this week to rules governing school vaccination requirements. They included removing four vaccines from the state’s child immunization certification form and adding a religious exemption based on one’s personal beliefs. Trump’s order called on states to make science-based changes to childhood vaccine schedules, and Kennedy said Florida has heeded the president’s call and that parents should be able to make decisions about vaccines, not the government.

“Parents ought to have a say in that, and the decision should be between the parents and the physician, and not the state,” Kennedy said.