Earlier this week, Diamantoni said his office had only recently received the report from the state about the baby girl’s death, telling reporters at the time only that it was of a “child.”
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine meddling
Amid a heated exchange with Shapiro, Kennedy ordered Erica Schwartz, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to remove the deaths from the agency’s data. CDC staff had already accepted the deaths as being from measles and had reported them as such. Schwartz reportedly removed them from the public website without objection, though a report on Thursday revealed they are still included in an internal CDC database.
The deaths remain excluded from the CDC’s public-facing data as of Friday afternoon, with only an asterisk in the chart where 2026 measles deaths would be reported. But the page was updated Friday to change the meaning of the asterisk. Previously, the asterisk linked to a note that read, in part: “available information does not establish whether measles caused or contributed to the deaths or whether the individuals died from other causes while infected with measles.” That note is gone, replaced by one saying: “The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) does not currently have any death records from 2026 that indicate measles is the underlying cause.”
Ars Technica reached out to the Department of Health and Human Services regarding the new note, asking whether it’s a new requirement that CDC can only report outbreak-linked deaths after NCHS has received death records and whether NCHS had death records at the time the CDC reported three measles deaths last year in Texas and New Mexico. It did not immediately respond.
Prior to Kennedy’s interference, state and local health departments were solely responsible for making determinations of measles-associated deaths, and the CDC reported the information it received.
The newborn’s death
The other death reported by the state health department was in a newborn boy, also from an Amish family in Lancaster County. At birth, his mother was severely ill with measles. She told The Atlantic that she became so ill, she could not speak above a whisper and “didn’t have a single piece of energy” as she went into labor. She became ill amid an ongoing state outbreak that has hit Lancaster County hard. Several of her other children became ill prior to her infection. The baby was born with a pulse but was not breathing. He was declared dead less than a half-hour later, after paramedics had been called and attempted to give the newborn oxygen and chest compressions. The parents believed without question that he died of measles. Their midwife thought the same.