After health officials in Pennsylvania found that two young children died from measles, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is refusing to count their deaths as being caused by the deadly virus.
“This week’s measles outbreaks update will not include the two measles-associated deaths reported by the Pennsylvania Department of Health on Aug. 25,” the CDC posted on its website, in a high unusual announcement.
It’s a precedent shattering action. The New York Times called it an “extraordinary move for the CDC,” breaking with the agency’s long-standing procedure of accepting data shared by states.
The challenge by the CDC comes amid a political showdown between health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who oversees the CDC, and Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro.
At a news conference last week, Shapiro announced the deaths of the two children from measles and condemned Kennedy for spreading vaccine misinformation, saying that “there’s real life consequences for spreading misinformation.”
RFK Jr responded on social media by accusing Shapiro of taking “giddy delight” in their deaths and even suggested he may even “fabricated” them. The CDC’s own announcement that it would not be counting the deaths as measles related came just days after the public spat.
According to the latest reporting, one of the deceased was a newborn with a ruptured spleen, and the other was a child of unknown age. Both were unvaccinated and tested positive for measles, the Pennsylvania Health Department said, per the NYT. They came from Lancaster County, the center of a measles outbreak where 242 people have been infected with the disease so far, the most in the state.
Conflicting information over the children’s deaths gave rise to the heated controversy.
Though the state’s health department said both deaths were due to measles, Lancaster County coroner Stephen Diamantoni, a Republican, said that his office’s pathologist determined that the newborn — which was born infected with virus which it inherited from its mother — died of a ruptured spleen, not measles.
But some top medical experts have pushed back against Diamontoni. Measles can enlarge a baby’s spleen and make them prone to rupturing during birth, wrote Paul Offit, a renowned vaccine and pediatric infectious disease expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in a widely reported essay on Substack. Once the spleen ruptures, it’s difficult to determine if it was enlarged after the fact.
Offit called on Diamontoni to provide more details surrounding the newborn’s death — and that, if it wasn’t measles, to offer an alternative explanation for the baby’s ruptured spleen. Since ruptured spleens in newborns is exceedingly rare and can be caused only by a handful of disorders or infections, he said, if one of those conditions wasn’t found in the child, then the “only obvious cause left would be measles.”
None of this explains why the CDC also refused to count the other child’s death, few details on whom have been released ot the public.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, defended its decision in a statement.
“The two measles-associated deaths announced by Pennsylvania have not been confirmed based on the information currently available to CDC,” it said, per the NYT. “The information currently posted reflects the best available information and our commitment to transparency and telling the American people the truth — a foundational principle of the Trump administration.”
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