RFK Jr. is a stupid scum-cum-sucking prick.......

Shapiro won’t say who died of measles. RFK Jr. is exploiting it.

The Health secretary suggested the Pennsylvania governor is hiding something about the deaths’ cause. Shapiro says he can’t say more.

By Carmen Paun

The death of two Pennsylvanians with measles has sparked a social media row between the state’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The dispute has also reprised a Covid 19-era debate: How much does it matter whether someone died from a disease or just died with a disease?

Pennsylvania health authorities strongly implied that the two died from measles in announcing their deaths Tuesday but also left some wiggle room in describing the deaths as “measles-associated.”

Shapiro then criticized Kennedy — a longtime vaccine skeptic — for his rhetoric around vaccines, which the governor said hasn’t helped stem the measles epidemic that has driven cases in the U.S. to a 35-year high. But Shapiro’s refusal to release further details about the deaths, citing patient privacy, has given Kennedy room to argue he is hiding something — or fabricating the deaths outright.

Vaccination advocates told POLITICO they’re worried Shapiro and Pennsylvania health officials’ secrecy has given Kennedy an opportunity to again cast the public health establishment as villains, just as he did during the pandemic, when he said officials were inflating the death toll by counting people who died of another disease but had also tested positive for Covid. The result has been a hardening of the positions dividing partisans in the fight over the latest infectious disease scourge.

“The anti-vaccine movement, they thrive when there’s an information vacuum or when there’s lack of clarity and communication,” said Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease doctor who practices in the Pittsburgh area and teaches at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Kennedy suggested Wednesday that a Shapiro aide had fabricated the deaths to blame the Health secretary and accused him of trotting out tactics Democrats used during the pandemic to rebut critics and to steer people toward getting vaccinated.

“The performance was a replay of the Democrats’ COVID playbook: fearmongering, misinformation, finger-pointing, and the weaponization of infectious disease fears for political gain,” Kennedy wrote on social media platform X.

Shapiro has said it’s Kennedy spreading misinformation — such as that the measles vaccine contains the remnants of aborted fetuses. While some vaccines, including measles, involve growing viruses in human cell cultures originally developed from two aborted fetuses in the 1960s, no fetal tissue remains in the vaccines produced today, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Shapiro and his health department have argued they’re not releasing more information to respect patient privacy. They have said the people who died were unvaccinated.

At a press conference Tuesday, Pennsylvania Health Secretary Debra Bogen declined to say more.

“We are protecting people’s privacy and confidentiality,” she said in a response to a reporter’s question about the ages of the people who died.

Shapiro also declined to say whether either of the two were Amish, nodding to the same privacy concerns. Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County, where state officials said the two people who died resided, is home to the country’s oldest Amish community, in which many refuse vaccination.

Kennedy has argued the measles outbreak in the U.S. has been mainly confined to members of religious communities who refuse vaccination and that his questioning of vaccine safety wasn’t to blame for the spread of the outbreak. He blames the drop in vaccination rates against measles on Covid vaccine mandates that many Americans opposed.

Nearly 2,800 measles cases have been reported in the U.S. this year, the most since the early 1990s.

Adalja said he didn’t fault Shapiro for declining to say whether the deaths were in the Amish community, because that could stigmatize it.

But he argued Shapiro could have shared more about the deceased’s ages and the state’s investigation of the deaths. Adalja said that Shapiro followed a very narrow interpretation of state patient privacy rules.

Shapiro talked Tuesday about how deaths from measles were preventable, suggesting that measles caused the deaths in his state.

But the state’s health department clarified in a statement Wednesday that measles might not have been “the immediate cause of death.”

In response to Kennedy’s suggestion that a Shapiro aide may have made up the deaths, Bogen said in a statement late Wednesday that she had “thoroughly reviewed the case investigation information” and “could confirm the two measles-related deaths.” She said the state reported the information to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s measles response team on Tuesday.

In a statement Thursday, the CDC said it’s “working to determine what actually occurred” and touted Kennedy’s “efforts to clarify conflicting information from Pennsylvania officials about whether the two reported deaths were caused by measles.”

The agency noted that Shapiro has declined the CDC’s offer of assistance. The Pennsylvania governor said Tuesday the state’s health department was able to manage the local outbreak.

“Accuracy is critical to reliable national data, transparency, and public trust,” the CDC statement continued. “During COVID-19, concerns arose about deaths being attributed as caused by the disease when individuals instead died from other causes,” it said.

Michael Mina, an epidemiologist and former Harvard scholar who’s currently a chief medical officer at a biotech company working on infectious diseases, wrote on X Wednesday that he was “increasingly perplexed” why more information wasn’t being provided on the two deaths.

“If the link is weak between measles and the deaths, state it. If the link is strong between measles and the deaths, state it,” he wrote.

Lancaster County Commissioner Josh Parsons, a Republican, accused Shapiro and state health officials of deception over the lack of clarity on the two deaths.

Parsons said the county coroner did not have any cases of people dying from measles but the coroner has provided information about a baby born at home who died soon after birth with measles but not because of it. The Pennsylvania health department said Wednesday that the infant was one of the two cases it was referring to.

Parsons emphasized in an X post Thursday that the baby could not have been vaccinated against measles because children typically aren’t vaccinated until they are a year old. Shapiro and Bogen had suggested the people who died were unvaccinated by choice, Parsons argued.

He then added that state authorities have not released any more information about the second death.

The governor’s office referred to Bogen’s Wednesday statement when asked for comment on Parsons’ accusation.

Adalja said more clarity from Pennsylvania would help.

“It’s going to be very hard for them to recover because there’s lots of people who have been saying that they don’t trust public health authorities after COVID,” he said. “This is like a textbook example of why that sentiment exists.”