It has been said that when politicians look in the mirror, they see a future president staring back at them. To be sure, many believe that is precisely what Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro imagines he sees when he gazes at the man looking back at him. But did he intentionally cross a line in service to his opportunism?
One person who may think so is Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
On Aug. 25, the Pennsylvania Department of Health reported “two measles-associated deaths in Pennsylvania,” both in Lancaster County and neither, allegedly, vaccinated against measles. Shapiro immediately high-tailed it to a local hospital to express his “deepest condolences” to the families, while also admitting that he had received a call from Kennedy but declined the secretary’s offer of federal assistance.
Said Shapiro: “I was very, very blunt with him and I made very clear that his actions and the rhetoric that is coming from this administration are having a negative impact on communities across America.”
Is that true? According to former New York Times journalist and bestselling author Alex Berenson, no.
For those who may not know, Berenson was arguably the major voice of reason in our nation during the COVID-19 pandemic. His reporting was exceptional, calling out the hysteria, the deliberate misinformation and the blatant power grabs connected to the Biden administration’s draconian COVID dictates.
But then, so did RFK, Jr. Aside from his widely read book, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” Kennedy regularly posted on the manufactured madness around the pandemic while also quite questioning the true effectiveness and safety of the new COVID vaccines.
For those reasons — and perhaps because Kennedy dared to run against the flailing Joe Biden in 2024 — many on the left viciously turned on the man they once revered, labeling him a “vax-denier.” The fact that Kennedy and Berenson have been proven correct time and again appears of no consequence to those politicians, journalists and biased medical “professionals” seeking to smear them at all costs.
But back to Berenson, and a post he put out after Shapiro’s press conference.
“Measles is highly contagious and can (very rarely) have terrible consequences. Vaccinating against it makes sense. But hyping measles’s dangers, while pretending the vaccine carries no risks, is wrong,” he wrote. “Worse, that jab-at-any-cost mindset bleeds into every shot, including ones that clearly do not work and have real dangers for kids, like the mRNA Covid shot.”
Berenson, who took a much deeper dive into this controversy for The Free Press, then cuts to the chase: “Of course, though, the legacy media fell over itself to highlight the Pennsylvania deaths. The reason was obvious. Despite endless hype about measles, not one person in the United States had died from the illness this year before Shapiro’s announcement. Not one.”
Is any child or any adult dying from measles a tragedy? Of course. But cherry-picking alleged cases for seeming political gain is beneath contempt.
To this very point, Kennedy posted: “Governor Shapiro’s unseemly rush to Lancaster County to convene a national press conference and his giddy delight in announcing two measles deaths was a morose commentary on the contemporary political dialogue. The performance was a replay of the Democrats’ COVID playbook: fearmongering, misinformation, finger-pointing, and the weaponization of infectious disease fears for political gain.”
Why do Democrats like Shapiro and their allies in the media seek to turn a rare measles death into national news? If they are truly concerned with saving lives, why not instead address the thousands of lives being lost every year in America’s inner cities?
To this point, President Trump recently and rightfully called out the mayor of Chicago and Illinois’s governor with this post on Truth Social:
“Chicago violence is unchecked and at record levels. It has never been worse! This weekend 41 people were shot, 3 DEAD. These numbers are becoming normalized. It is out of control! The city will die if the Federal Government, a fine tuned crime fighting machine, is not invited in, by the Mayor or Governor, to HELP. I am awaiting the call. Nobody should be forced to live under these conditions. Like D.C. and others, they will have almost no crime, FAST! The State and City can’t do what I do. Governor Pritzker, CALL!!! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Just how bad is Chicago? As the Chicago Tribune reported several years ago, over the course of the last 60 years, more than 40,000 men, women and children have been murdered in the city, and more than 500,000 have been wounded — most of them Black, thousands of them innocent bystanders.
Does Shapiro care about such tragic violence in American cities? Who knows? He’d rather hold a press conference about two deaths that may have been measles related.
Secretary Kennedy closed out his post with this: “Governor Shapiro got his headlines. He correctly gambled that the slavish mainstream media would dutifully amplify his scolding without any effort to check his facts.”
Indeed. Ambulance-chasing politics often does succeed. But at what cost?
Douglas MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official.
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