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Confirmed “It’s long past time for RFK to stop playing games with people’s lives.” A six-week-old baby girl in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, died from measles, the county coroner confirmed to local press on Friday. Stephen Diamantoni, a Republican elected coroner in 2007, told Lancaster Online that the baby died at home. “I believe it was the 18th of August,” he said. He also noted that the baby had a genetic condition called Amish lethal microcephaly, in which babies are born with unusually small heads and underdeveloped brains. This condition is caused by a mutation in the SLC25A19 gene, which codes for a protein involved with energy-producing enzymes in the mitochondria and is important for brain development. About 1 in 500 babies in the Old Order Amish population of Pennsylvania is born with the condition. Infants with the disorder typically survive only about six months. Diamantoni confirmed that while microcephaly was present, measles was the cause of death.
Pennsylvania’s two measles deaths: The death is one of two reported by the state’s health department last week. Additionally, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro shared a local news report about the coroner’s confirmation on social media. The tragic deaths—both in infants, the other a newborn boy—have sparked controversy after anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed without evidence that the state may have ‘fabricated’ them. Diamantoni himself reportedly said he had not received the death reports at the time of the state’s announcement, fueling Kennedy’s false claim.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine meddling: Amid a heated exchange with Shapiro, Kennedy ordered Erica Schwartz, the new director of the CDC, to remove the deaths from the agency’s data. CDC staff had already accepted the deaths as measles-related and reported them. Schwartz reportedly removed them from the public website, though they remain in an internal CDC database. The deaths are now excluded from the CDC’s public-facing data, with an asterisk indicating the absence of official records confirming measles as the cause.
The newborn’s death: The other death reported by the state health department was in a newborn boy from an Amish family in Lancaster County. His mother, severely ill with measles, could barely speak and had no energy during labor. Several of her other children had previously fallen ill during an ongoing outbreak in Lancaster County. The newborn was born with a pulse but not breathing, declared dead within half an hour after paramedics attempted oxygen and chest compressions. The parents and midwife believed the baby died from measles, but Diamantoni claimed a pathologist found a ruptured spleen as the cause, not measles. Paul Offit, a vaccine and pediatric infectious disease expert, challenged this assessment, arguing measles can cause spleen enlargement and rupture, especially in newborns. Offit noted that ruptured spleens are extremely rare in newborns without measles, and no alternative explanation has been publicly provided.
Governor Shapiro criticized Kennedy for sowing doubt about the tragedies, urging accurate reporting and adherence to medical experts’ guidance to protect families and children from measles. This article was updated with the Pennsylvania Department of Health’s response to Ars Technica.
Source: Ars Technica
