Measles Is Winning

Following America’s recent measles deaths, anti-vaccine activists have cast doubt on the virus as the culprit.

They’ve pointed to a victim’s underlying health conditions or, as they did last year in Texas, blamed hospital error.

But the two latest measles deaths in Pennsylvania—bringing the state’s total to four since mid-August—have made the United States’ measles crisis undeniable.

Last month, the Pennsylvania Department of Health announced two measles-associated deaths; both cases were later revealed to be infants too young to have been vaccinated.

In response, Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.—who was an anti-vaccine activist for decades before becoming health secretary—wrote on X that the deaths might have been “altogether fabricated.” (He later acknowledged a coroner’s conclusion that one of the deaths had been caused by measles.) Then, last weekend, an unvaccinated 40-year-old woman died in Jefferson County; immediately, people on Reddit and X insisted that her death wasn’t really caused by measles, because she’d had asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, both of which can make breathing difficult.

Yesterday, state officials revealed that an unvaccinated 18-year-old died from a rare inflammatory condition of the brain and spinal cord that can be triggered by measles.

Some commenters online deemed that death suspicious too.

What the armchair epidemiologists miss is that vulnerability to the infection doesn’t make a death less real.

The two infants both tested positive for measles.

The Lancaster County coroner’s office determined that one infant died of a ruptured spleen; however, when I spoke with that child’s parents , they told me that the mother had been extremely ill with the disease when she gave birth, the baby was not breathing when he was born, and they believed measles had killed their son.

The other infant was born with a rare neurological condition, but the coroner found that measles was ultimately the cause of death.

Greg Furlong, the Jefferson County coroner who investigated the 40-year-old woman’s death, told me that although the woman had conditions that made her vulnerable to measles, and was on supplemental oxygen, she was active before she contracted the virus.

She cooked for her family and cleaned the house.