The family at the center of Pennsylvania’s measles controversy tells their story. By Tom Bartlett in The Atlantic (thanks to Ed Marcuse)
When the Amish man emerged from his barn to greet me, he had no idea that his newborn son’s death had become national news. The man wore a straw hat, black trousers, and suspenders over a long-sleeved blue shirt; one of his similarly dressed sons was guiding a horse-drawn plow in a nearby field.
The man told me that, like most Amish people, he and his family don’t watch TV or use the internet. They don’t read the newspaper either. So they didn’t know until I told them that last Tuesday, Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, held a press conference to announce the first two “measles-associated” deaths in the state in 35 years. Both of the people who died were from Lancaster County, which is home to the largest Amish community in the country and has been hardest hit by the state’s months-long measles outbreak.
They also didn’t know that Shapiro’s political opponents are accusing him of using the deaths to score political points, or that the county’s coroner later told reporters that his office had performed an autopsy on an infant who tested positive for measles but that the cause of death had been a ruptured spleen. The confusion led Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, to mock Shapiro on X, calling his press conference “unseemly” and an example of “the weaponization of infectious disease fears for political gain.” Without evidence, Kennedy wrote that “the deaths may even have been altogether fabricated by one of the Governor’s hopeful staffers.” (continued on Page 2)