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 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] cannot stand it,” Kennedy said.
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Brandy Zadrozny is a senior enterprise reporter for MS NOW.