Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday defended the Trump administration’s response to recent measles deaths in Pennsylvania, saying the United States has done better than other countries fighting what he said is a global measles outbreak.
“It’s all over the world,” Kennedy said in answer to a reporter’s question about his agency’s response to the Pennsylvania outbreak at an unrelated event in Virginia.
Kennedy said the United States has had 4,000 measles cases this year compared with 20,000 cases in Mexico and 7,000 in Canada. According to the World Health Organization, Bangladesh leads the world with 65,439 cases reported in the last six months; Mexico ranked 7th, with 6,844 cases.
The Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy said last week that the U.S. is on track to double last year’s measles cases because of declining vaccination rates, as the U.S. endures its worst year for the disease since 1991.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been 4,080 confirmed measles cases in the U.S. in 2026 resulting from 42 measles outbreaks, the largest being in Pennsylvania.
The United States has seen eight reported measles-associated deaths in the last two years ‚ more than the combined total of reported deaths over the previous three decades. Of those, five have been in Pennsylvania, according to the state’s Health Department.
A sixth measles-associated death was reported over the weekend that the state is currently reviewing.
“I am confident I will bring that outbreak to a quick close,” Kennedy said.
Pennsylvania has reported 1,222 measles illnesses so far this year across 42 counties, the state Health Department reported Wednesday. None of the people who died were vaccinated, according to the department.
The nation eliminated the domestic spread of measles in 2000 by maintaining high vaccination rates, but they have fallen in recent years to below the 95% coverage needed to prevent outbreaks.
“The measles outbreak is occurring because so many people went unvaccinated during the COVID pandemic,” Kennedy said, attributing the idea to Dr. Anthony Fauci, who served on the White House Coronavirus Task Force starting in early 2020.
In the roughly 1,000 pages of Fauci’s COVID-era journal released in July, through of a subpoena filed by Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Fauci said he worried children would miss their measles vaccinations because of COVID shutdowns.
On Thursday, Kennedy blamed Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro for failing to accept assistance from the CDC’s emergency Epi-Aid program — assistance Shapiro requested in September but made conditional on the CDC recognizing that four measles-associated deaths the state had reported be included in the federal agency’s Measles Cases and Outbreaks dashboard.
Kennedy said that issue was resolved this week. On Tuesday, the CDC announced it would deploy a “disease detective” to help bring the outbreak to an end.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.