US health officials exclude measles-related deaths in Pennsylvania from counts

Top US health officials and government agencies are currently not including the two recent measles-associated deaths in Pennsylvania in their counts.

“This is highly unusual,” said Debra Houry, former chief medical officer of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She noted that this did not happen with the three deaths reported from measles in Texas and New Mexico last year.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), gave the wrong number of measles deaths in a recent interview with Fox News.

“In 10 years, there have been three measles deaths in America,” he said, comparing that with deaths from “food-induced illness” – a category the CDC does not appear to track. “The media and certain demagogue politicians are constantly trying to scare us about infectious disease,” Kennedy said, adding that he was attempting to “redirect attention and resource [sic] to the thing that’s really killing Americans, which are foodborne diseases”.

There were three deaths associated with measles in the US last year, the first deaths from the virus in a decade. But Pennsylvania also reported two measles-related deaths in August, including at least one newborn who died soon after birth.

Kennedy has suggested that these two deaths were “fabricated”.

The CDC has also stopped short of reporting deaths from measles in 2026.

The agency posted a note on Friday saying it was delaying its weekly update, keeping the number at zero. On Sunday, the measles landing page appears to have been updated twice, with the two deaths first reported and then replaced with an asterisk.

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Source: The Guardian, 31 August 2026