{"id":903359,"date":"2026-11-02T15:48:09","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T15:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/903359\/"},"modified":"2026-11-02T15:48:09","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T15:48:09","slug":"its-clear-they-are-under-vaccinated-amish-under-spotlight-amid-pennsylvania-measles-outbreak-pennsylvania","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/903359\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It\u2019s clear they are under-vaccinated\u2019: Amish under spotlight amid Pennsylvania measles outbreak | Pennsylvania"},"content":{"rendered":"

Making hay was more than a figure of speech last week at the New Holland auction house in Pennsylvania<\/a> last week, where a ton of top quality hay bales were going for upwards of $400, up about 20% from last year.<\/p>\n

For members of the Lancaster settlement, a term used to describe the Amish population that settled here in 1760, the price of hay was only part of the discussion: the price of horses, donkeys and milk were also topics of conversation and, as it has been for year or more, a potentially deadly outbreak of measles.<\/p>\n

In the most recent count, 1,398 cases had been detected, according to the Pennsylvania department of health. Since 1 August, 150,000 doses of MMR<\/a> vaccine had been administered, with more than 50,000 given in October alone.<\/p>\n

The outbreak, and the politics surrounding it under Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health secretary, has focused on Lancaster county, placing the Amish under a spotlight. While there is no Amish religious opposition to vaccines broadly, a study found that that less that a third of Amish residents had been immunized against measles, mumps and rubella.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t that way 50 years ago in our community,\u201d said Christ Stoltzfoos, standing outside a barn of horses, miniature ponies and donkeys that were also up for auction. But Stoltzfoos didn\u2019t have a ready explanation for why vaccinations had lapsed in the community, which is descended from German-speaking religious conservatives and where the modern world is largely kept at bay.<\/p>\n

All of his immediate family had been vaccinated, and had not got sick, but some cousins weren\u2019t and did, Stoltzfoos said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI guess you don\u2019t get to change anybody\u2019s mind. The people that changed their mind are the people who got really sick from it. They say now they would have gotten vaccinated. But the people that didn\u2019t really get sick, they still say: \u2018Oh, it\u2019s not really that bad.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

A hay auction at The Green Dragon Farmers Market and Auction in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, on 9 October 2026. Photograph: Jessie Wardarski\/AP<\/p>\n

The attention the Amish have received while experiencing the worst outbreak in the nation has not always been welcome. But the state, under Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor, has mounted an intensive outreach of pop-up clinics and mailings to encourage the community to get protection.<\/p>\n

The Lancaster settlement depends in large part on tourism, with coachloads of visitors stopping to buy shoofly pie and other Amish delicacies. Vaccination is thus, in part, a business decision. Still, almost two-thirds of measles cases in Pennsylvania have been among adults, a mirror opposite of how measles is typically transmitted.<\/p>\n

All five of the Pennsylvania mortalities involved people who were unvaccinated by choice or because they were too young to receive it, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.<\/p>\n

But within the Lancaster community, vaccines don\u2019t necessarily carry the politicization of the \u201cEnglish\u201d world. \u201cA lot of people now get the shots,\u201d Stoltzfoos said.<\/p>\n

Nearby, John Kaufman, 81, was operating from a different playbook. He said the vaccine was hard on the immune system. \u201cYou get the measles and you get over it. People have it once, and it\u2019s over. But if you hurt your immune system with the shots, something else will creep up on. The shot will take care of the measles, but it\u2019ll stir something else up. Then what?\u201d<\/p>\n

He pointed to reports that Covid shots had been linked to heart attacks and, he said, cancer: \u201cIf you\u2019re strong and healthy you might be able to work the Covid shot off. But if you had a weakness in yourself, it could take over.\u201d<\/p>\n

Measles, mumps and rubella virus vaccine at Union Community Care clinic in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Jessie Wardarski\/AP<\/p>\n

Anna, a young woman at the auction, also said she had had measles. \u201cIt was miserable,\u201d she said. \u201cMy whole family had it, except my dad. He got the vaccine. I wouldn\u2019t get the vaccine now because if you had measles, you\u2019re stronger for it. Why change that?\u201d<\/p>\n

Thinking around the measles vaccine in the community is in some ways a reflection of thinking in the \u201cEnglish\u201d world beyond, where health authorities are battling outbreaks in South Carolina and Texas for much of the last year. But those outbreaks primarily affect children.<\/p>\n

Pennsylvania has recorded five measles-associated deaths (including two infants and three adults with underlying health conditions), but those numbers are not reflected in CDC data, which records three deaths nationwide of 4,588 confirmed cases in 2026.<\/p>\n

This month Kennedy, who heads the vaccine-skeptic Maha movement, claimed that the \u201cpeople of Pennsylvania suffered\u201d because Shapiro\u2019s administration politicized the state\u2019s measles outbreak.<\/p>\n

Kennedy said that a \u201cglobal measles outbreak\u201d had been caused by decline in the number of people receiving the measles vaccine during Covid. Pennsylvania, which has 27% of US cases, had only begun applying for CDC emergency assistance in September.<\/p>\n

But Shapiro claimed that the CDC would not correctly acknowledge the measles-related deaths \u201cbecause it doesn\u2019t fit their phony narrative. I think RFK is doing great destruction in this country by stoking this vaccine skepticism.\u201d The state has sent 300 health department staff to the area and administered nearly 6,000 vaccinations.<\/p>\n

Children from the Plain community play on a trampoline in Intercourse, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Jessie Wardarski\/AP<\/p>\n

Vaccination politics has also reached the race for Pennsylvania\u2019s 11th congressional district, where five-term Republican representative Lloyd Smucker is being challenged by Democrat Nancy Mannion. At a town hall-style debate last week, Smucker, who was raised Amish until he was five years old, said the Amish are making decisions they think are best for their families.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe role of government should be to do research and development on vaccines and be open and transparent about what that means. It was disappointing to me to see the governor using the measles to score political points,\u201d he said. \u201cIt turns out that the first two deaths really weren\u2019t caused by measles at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Mannion, a former emergency nurse and international healthcare leader, told the Guardian: \u201cThe Amish aren\u2019t anti-vaccination, but they don\u2019t access the healthcare system in the same way. It\u2019s not just the Amish that are part of this outbreak because of the skepticism has brought to vaccines I would tie directly back to Robert Kennedy Jr.\u201d<\/p>\n

Measles, Mannion said, \u201cis completely preventable and had been eradicated, but now we\u2019re living in a surge. I\u2019d say there is a link between his anti-vaccine stance generally and what were seeing now.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Amish in Lancaster are not the only such community to experience larger political forces. In upstate New York, the state health department has been battling three small Amish schools over whether the children fall under immunization rules or should be granted an exemption on freedom of religious practice grounds.<\/p>\n

Kathy Hochul, the New York governor, recently declared a statewide health emergency after more than 100 people contracted measles, an outbreak epidemiologists believe is connected to the outbreak in Pennsylvania and also one in Ohio. The schools now face fines of $2,000 per unvaccinated student.<\/p>\n

Steven Nolt, professor of history and Anabaptist studies at Elizabethtown College, points out that is by family tradition and not religious instruction that the Amish accept or decline immunizations. At the same time, he said, there is some evidence that vaccine-skeptical groups had been doing outreach to the Amish since 2015.<\/p>\n

But accurate information is hard to come by, he says. \u201cWe don\u2019t have good data but it\u2019s clear they are under-vaccinated, but by how much we don\u2019t know. The Amish are a religious group, so governments are not allowed to track information. We don\u2019t know any better how many Amish are immunized than how many Anglicans or Presbyterians are immunized.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the New Holland auction, the measles question was in fact less pressing than land values, interest rates, the costs of diesel, hay and livestock. The Amish were to some extent protected from the price of fuel because they use horses in the fields, but also exposed because of their use of diesel-powered generators, pickers and milking machines.<\/p>\n

A shift in farming practices, from crops and livestock to milk and vegetables, also presented changes, and many had moved away from agriculture to furniture-making and construction. Dairy prices were way down but organic milk was a good business, Christ and his uncle Amos Stoltzfoos agreed, with 100lbs fetching $51.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re at their mercy but I don\u2019t feel that we\u2019re wrongly used,\u201d Christ said of the milk companies. But sales of raw milk, illegal to consumers in New York have also become an outside political issue.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s good they regulate raw milk or it will be like the measles soon,\u201d Christ Stoltzfoos said. Both agreed that the Amish don\u2019t like to deal directly with the government. \u201cMost of us don\u2019t even know what\u2019s going on,\u201d the younger man said. \u201cI read the paper but that don\u2019t tell me much.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Making hay was more than a figure of speech last week at the New Holland auction house in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":903360,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[97],"class_list":["post-903359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=903359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903359\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/903360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=903359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=903359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=903359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}