{"id":295722,"date":"2026-09-28T19:04:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T19:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/295722\/"},"modified":"2026-09-28T19:04:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T19:04:09","slug":"looking-back-at-the-deadly-philadelphia-measles-outbreak-of-1991","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/295722\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking Back at the Deadly Philadelphia Measles Outbreak of 1991"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNews<\/a>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

With the preventable infectious disease dominating headlines 35 years later, we’ve learned nothing. Instead, things have gotten worse. Much, much worse.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Pennsylvania<\/p>\n

Pennsylvania is in the middle of a measles outbreak, so we take a look back at the 1991 measles outbreak in Philadelphia. \/ Image via Getty Images<\/p>\n

Bob Ross remembers the moment vividly. The date was January 16, 1991, the same day that then-President George H.W. Bush launched Operation Desert Storm, the second stage of America\u2019s war with Iraq. Little did Ross know that Philadelphia was about to embark on a war of its own.<\/p>\n

Ross, then the 36-year-old deputy health commissioner for the City of Philadelphia, was sitting inside the Department of Public Health building on South Broad Street on that unseasonably warm winter day when his office phone rang. On the other end of the line was a woman who was reluctant to give her name. She wanted to convey an anonymous tip.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wound up nicknaming her \u2018Deep Throat,\u2019\u201d recalls Ross \u2014 a reference to the Washington Post\u2019s secret Watergate source \u2014 with a half-suppressed laugh.<\/p>\n

The woman said her daughter was a member of Faith Tabernacle Congregation, a small Nicetown church attended by mostly white working-class families living in Northeast Philadelphia. It wasn\u2019t a church that was on Ross\u2019s radar. Hell, it wasn\u2019t really on anybody\u2019s radar. It was just one of hundreds of churches in the city. Except it wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Faith Tabernacle congregants didn\u2019t believe in doctors, the woman explained. They refused all medical treatment, instead trusting that God would heal according to His will. Some would live. Some would die. But it was God\u2019s decision. Unsurprisingly for a group of people who won\u2019t seek medical intervention even when they\u2019re dying, the flock also forbade all preventative medicine, including vaccinations and immunizations.<\/p>\n

The tipster told Ross she was concerned about her granddaughter, who was a student at the church school, which was presided over by the church\u2019s fundamentalist pastor, Charles Reinert. The grandmother said an alarming number of children at the school had recently come down with what she suspected was measles, and she was worried that her granddaughter would be next. The sick students, she explained, had developed blotchy rashes all over their bodies \u2014 a telltale early symptom of measles, as Ross knew all too well.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd before long, the first kid at the school dies,\u201d says Ross. \u201cThe parents only called after the kid was already dead. I was astonished. It made me realize what a nightmare this was going to be. Either their faith was so strong or they were so deranged, depending on your point of view, that they wouldn\u2019t call a doctor when their child was dying.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though the church would quickly become the focal point of a public-health crisis in early 1991, Faith Tabernacle wasn\u2019t the beginning of the measles outbreak in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n

Back on April 20, 1989, the Athens, Georgia, alt-rock band R.E.M. played the Spectrum in South Philly, closing their main set with \u201cIt\u2019s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).\u201d In the audience that night was a teenager who had just returned from a trip to Spain and had brought an unwelcome passenger: a case of measles.<\/p>\n

According to Children\u2019s Hospital of Philadelphia vaccine expert Paul A. Offit<\/a>, who has closely followed and chronicled the spread of preventable diseases throughout his career, this R.E.M. fan appears to have been Philadelphia\u2019s patient zero. A handful of others at the show soon came down with cases. \u201cMeasles had entered the city,\u201d Offit wrote of this moment in his 2015 book Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine.<\/p>\n

Measles cases continued to pop up here and there in the densely populated city in 1989 and 1990 \u2014 as is common with highly contagious infectious diseases. But measles never managed to get a firm grip on any particular neighborhood or community in that two-year period, in part because the vaccination rate among the overall population was reasonably good. That all changed once the illness made its way to the Faith Tabernacle school.<\/p>\n

Enrollment at the grades-one-through-12 institution was reported at about 200 students, none of whom had been immunized against measles. The disease is easily transmitted through the air when an infected person coughs or sneezes. A mild case can pair flu-like symptoms with that blotchy rash. More serious cases can lead to pneumonia, dehydration, blindness, or inflammation of the brain. Before a vaccine became available in 1963, nearly every child in the United States caught measles, resulting in some 48,000 hospitalizations and 400 to 500 deaths a year.<\/p>\n

While somebody in your neighborhood might have come down with measles back in 1991, it wouldn\u2019t have spread like wildfire, provided enough of your neighbors had been immunized. But taking scores of unimmunized children and cramming them into the same building is the epidemiological equivalent of a tinderbox.<\/p>\n

\u201cInterference With God\u2019s Will\u201d<\/p>\n

On February 7, 1991, the first child at Faith Tabernacle died of measles. Her name was Caryn Still. She was just nine years old. Three days later, Still\u2019s classmate, Monica Johnson, was also pronounced dead. What started as a rash on Johnson\u2019s body led to unconsciousness and, finally, cardiac arrest. True to church doctrine, Johnson\u2019s parents never called a pediatrician to see if there was anything they could do \u2014 not even to make their daughter more comfortable, let alone save her life.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the strengthening of our belief,\u201d Johnson\u2019s father told the Philadelphia Daily News at the time in defense of his failure to seek medical treatment for his dying daughter. \u201cThat is why God has chosen her.\u201d The father also said that immunizations amounted to \u201cinterference with God\u2019s will,\u201d echoing what his pastor had preached from the pulpit time and time again. (The Johnson family would eventually lose another daughter, Tina Louise, to measles.)<\/p>\n

Realizing he needed a face-to-face meeting with the church\u2019s pastor, Ross took a ride out to the rectory. His goal was to convince Reinert that he needed to tell his parishioners to get their children vaccinated and to seek medical treatment for any current rashes or fevers, stat. Reinert was relatively cordial, says Ross, which wasn\u2019t at all the reception he expected. But he was completely unmoved by Ross\u2019s pleas for compassion and common sense.<\/p>\n

\u201cI gave it the old college try,\u201d says Ross. \u201cBut it was really a waste of time. At the end of the day, these parents were taught that God and Jesus heal all, and that\u2019s that. It was an absolute. There was no room for interpretation.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the visit to the rectory wasn\u2019t completely useless.<\/p>\n

Ross managed to convince Reinert to turn over a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers for all of the families with children in the church school. The two men also came to an agreement about how Ross would proceed next. They agreed that the health department wouldn\u2019t examine or provide treatment to a child without a parent\u2019s permission, in most cases. But \u2014 and this is a very important but \u2014 if the department came across a child with serious complications that required immediate hospitalization, Reinert understood that Ross would have no choice but to make a phone call and have the child taken to the nearest hospital. And if a parent refused to allow that to happen, as Ross suspected some would, he would go to a judge and get a court order. Reinert assured Ross the church wouldn\u2019t fight any such court orders duly handed down by the bench.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a bit of a negotiation,\u201d says Ross. \u201cThere was a lot of back-and-forth, but eventually, I got that much out of him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ross immediately started making calls, with minimal success. A few days into the effort, he learned of another death at the school and realized the mother of the child in question had been one of his first calls from the list.<\/p>\n

\u201cI said, \u2018Holy shit!\u2019\u201d Ross recalls. \u201cThat kid had to be tremendously ill, if not near death, when I talked to the mother. She specifically told me that the kid was okay. And that\u2019s when it came to me that these phone calls just weren\u2019t enough. I told my colleagues that we had to get to these families in person. It was clear that we couldn\u2019t rely on verbal reporting of the health status of a kid.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ross went to the chief residents at St. Christopher\u2019s and at CHOP, where he had trained in pediatrics prior to joining the health department, and told them he needed pediatricians and nurses to volunteer to make house calls. The team, Ross included, fanned out across the city.<\/p>\n

By the time Ross and the other doctors and nurses got to the families, they learned that many of the children they encountered had recently had measles and that most had already recovered without any kind of medical assistance. But not all.<\/p>\n

Ross visited a home in Northeast Philadelphia with nine children, according to the church\u2019s list. (Large households were the norm in the church, Ross says, because just as the church preached against immunizations, it preached against birth control.) When Ross arrived, he found the kids\u2019 grandmother taking care of them. The parents were both at work. As he casually observed the children in the living room, Ross saw signs that they had recently had measles \u2014 the fiery red rash eventually starts to fade \u2014 and was glad they appeared to be on the road to a full recovery. \u201cThe kids actually looked pretty good,\u201d remembers Ross.<\/p>\n

Then he noticed something. The list Reinert had given him indicated that the family had a total of nine children. But as he looked around the room, he counted only eight. Ross asked about the discrepancy, and the grandmother reluctantly told him that one of the children was upstairs, watching TV. He went up the stairs and was alarmed by the young girl he saw.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s lying on a couch in front of the TV, looking like death warmed over,\u201d Ross says. \u201cShe was icy. Wasting away.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ross asked the grandmother how long the girl had been like that and says he got a lecture about the \u201cpower of God that heals all.\u201d He asked to use the phone \u2014 \u201cThis was before the days of cell phones\u201d \u2014 and called a judge to get a court order, figuring it was the only way he was going to get the girl to a hospital. The judge granted the order, and EMTs showed up within minutes to take the girl to the emergency room at St. Christopher\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey saved her life!\u201d Ross says. \u201cBut when I went to check on her in the hospital the next day, when she looked 80 times better, her grandmother and parents greeted me with nothing but hostility. If looks could kill, I would have died that day.\u201d<\/p>\n

The girl was soon back home. Meanwhile, the health department visited more families. In all, four court orders were obtained to hospitalize children. More lives were saved.<\/p>\n

But the court orders covered emergency treatment only, not immunizations for families at the church. And Ross didn\u2019t want to wind up back where he\u2019d started. So he came up with a drastic idea: forced immunizations for the children of religious objectors. He went to then-Mayor Wilson Goode to talk him into getting the city\u2019s lawyers to make it happen and found it an easy sell. \u201cI think he was looking back on the MOVE bombing<\/a>, recognizing that he had to do something about all these horrible headlines about yet another tragic situation in Philadelphia,\u201d Ross reflects. The years from 1989 to 1991 saw a spike in measles cases across the country, and the outbreak in Philadelphia was among the worst. And headlines in national newspapers reflected that, in part because of the involvement of the church, which some considered a cult.<\/p>\n

The pastor, Reinert, thought he could get the American Civil Liberties Union to intervene on the church\u2019s behalf, but even the ACLU wouldn\u2019t take the case. \u201cThere is certainly a free-exercise-of-religion claim by the parents,\u201d the head of the Philadelphia ACLU told the Inquirer. \u201cBut there is also a competing claim that parents don\u2019t have the right to martyr their children.\u201d<\/p>\n

The health department eventually got its way. Nurses inoculated any Faith Tabernacle child who hadn\u2019t yet been exposed. By June of 1991, the measles outbreak here had run its course.<\/p>\n

Between Faith Tabernacle and one other Philadelphia church with similar beliefs, six children died from measles, out of 486 people infected. Outside the churches, three children died out of 938 people infected, meaning the risk inside the churches was about 1,000 times greater, as Offit points out in his 2015 book. If only they had been vaccinated.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat vaccine is 97 percent effective,\u201d Offit says today. \u201cThe math isn\u2019t hard.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDisturbed and Deeply Troubled\u201d<\/p>\n

That measles outbreak in Philadelphia was 35 years ago, long before the anti-vaxxer movement took hold in America. The movement thrived in the early 2000s, pushed on social media by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., long before he\u2019d become Secretary of Health and Human Services, by B-list celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, and by activist bloggers and influencers pushing \u201cparental choice.\u201d The movement was yet another hurdle for public-health officials.<\/p>\n

In 2020, the issue exploded during the COVID pandemic. The 1991 measles outbreak claimed nine lives in Philadelphia. COVID killed 5,600 Philadelphians. Meanwhile, the debate over boosters and masks led to protests and violence around the country. There was even a lawsuit filed by parents against the Bucks County School District alleging that the district\u2019s mask mandate was all part of a \u201cSatanic ritual.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now here we are in 2026, decades after we thought we eliminated measles from the United States, and measles are once again dominating the headlines. In Pennsylvania, measles infections are about to surpass 900 cases<\/a>, with 55 new cases reported in just two days last week. At least six babies in the state have been born with measles<\/a>, despite the rarity of congenital measles. There have been four measles-related deaths statewide during this current outbreak, none in Philadelphia, but officials are on high alert and potential exposures have been reported at CHOP and Philadelphia International Airport in recent days.<\/p>\n

Offit says we\u2019re now much worse off than we were in 1991 or during the pandemic.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have a President of the United States who is clearly anti-vaccine,\u201d Offit tells Philly Mag, going to on mention the president\u2019s recent statements<\/a> that the MMR vaccine as delivered today is \u201cquite lethal.\u201d \u201cYou have the Secretary of Health and Human Services that at the beginning of this epidemic with measles said the measles vaccine causes blindness, the measles vaccine causes deafness, the measles vaccine kills people every year, that the vaccine causes the same symptoms as measles. So we have an anti-vaccine activist as president and an anti-vaccine activist as Secretary of Health and Human Services.\u201d<\/p>\n

Offit added that while the 1991 outbreak in Philadelphia centered on a church that proudly preached anti-vaccination from the pulpit, now you have the leader of the free world and RFK Jr. adding fuel to the deadly fire, helped along by Trump\u2019s evangelists, social media, and the bots that overpopulate it.<\/p>\n

As for that church in 1991, Faith Tabernacle still exists, with several congregations in Pennsylvania. Reinert died 25 years ago. The church office didn\u2019t return our call seeking comment. But when we asked the pastor in 2021 how the church\u2019s teachings might have changed between 1991 and then, he quite simply told us they hadn\u2019t, that the church\u2019s teachings regarding vaccinations and medical treatments remained the same. And then he promptly hung up.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am disturbed and deeply troubled,\u201d says Ross, who went on to become the city\u2019s health commissioner before moving to California, where he is now retired. \u201cThis is a disease that is largely \u2014 if not entirely \u2014 preventable. And yet, here we are again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ed. Note: Portions of this article appeared in Philadelphia magazine in 2021.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"News With the preventable infectious disease dominating headlines 35 years later, we’ve learned nothing. Instead, things have gotten…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295723,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,71,70],"class_list":["post-295722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295722\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}