Page H8From§Each · the Health book15 September to 17 September 2026
Health
THE DEATH COUNT
By ChipStaff Writer · the early bird edition, 15 September 2026
I want to walk you through the Pennsylvania numbers the way the agency walked through them, because the sequence is the defense.
On August 25th, the state health department said two people in Lancaster County had died of measles — the first measles deaths in Pennsylvania in 35 years. Both were unvaccinated. Secretary Bogen used the word "eliminated" like she still believed it applied. Two days later, CMS administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz went on Fox Business and said the federal government could not yet confirm the cause of death. That's a defensible sentence on its own. A death certificate takes lab work and a coroner's signature, and a state's word isn't automatically the federal count.
By August 28th, RFK Jr. was saying the same thing, louder. By September 1st, it was CDC policy: the two Pennsylvania deaths would not appear in the agency's weekly outbreak tally, pending review. The Hill's own sourcing called that a radical departure from how the CDC normally treats state-reported deaths. I was ready to call that caution — right up until September 4th, when the Lancaster County coroner confirmed what he'd apparently been finishing on his own clock: the six-week-old infant had died of measles. Full stop. His name on the finding.
So the review the agency said it needed had already been done, locally, before the agency finished not believing it.
RFK Jr. accepted the infant's death on September 5th. He also said Governor Shapiro had "politicized" it, which is one way to describe a state reporting a dead infant before a federal press office signs off on saying so. Then this week, Pennsylvania reported a third and fourth measles death. The state's count is four. House Democrats on Energy and Commerce sent new CDC director Erica Schwartz a letter asking why the agency disputed the count to begin with.
I don't have their answer. I was going to say the agency was protecting the public from unverified numbers. What the public actually went without, for about a week and a half, was the true number — while a coroner in Lancaster County already had the paperwork finished.
This is the deadliest year for measles in the United States since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000. The argument over the count didn't change that number. It only changed how long you didn't know it.
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By ChipStaff Writer · the early evening edition, 15 September 2026
The Secretary's position on Pennsylvania's measles deaths has been consistent, provided you don't compare any two dates.
On August 25th, the state's health department confirmed the first measles deaths in Pennsylvania in thirty-five years — two unvaccinated residents of Lancaster County. Health Secretary Debra Bogen noted the disease had been "largely eliminated" in the state for more than three decades. That was the baseline.
Three days later, on August 28th, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seized on what his own department called vague information from Pennsylvania to publicly question whether the deaths had happened as reported. By September 1st, the CDC had backed him up institutionally: the agency pulled both deaths from its weekly outbreak tally, pending review, a move The Hill described as a "radical departure" from its normal practice of simply accepting a state's numbers. The agency whose job is counting the dead spent four days not counting them.
On September 5th, four days after that omission, Kennedy accepted the count was right. He conceded that a six-week-old infant had died of measles, citing the finding of the Lancaster County coroner — the same coroner Pennsylvania had been citing all along. Having spent four days disputing that finding, the Secretary then accused Governor Josh Shapiro of having "politicized" the death. He had just finished un-politicizing it himself, which is one way to describe reversing your own position.
Eighteen days after Kennedy first raised his doubts, Pennsylvania reported two more deaths: an 18-year-old on Tuesday, a 40-year-old woman over the weekend. The state's total is now four. Nationally, it is the worst year for measles deaths since 1992 — a 35-year high, arriving on the same timeline as the Secretary's own doubt, not despite it.
The Secretary's office says it is simply following the science, the same science it declined to tally for four days in early September. Correction — it never declined. It reviewed. For four days. During which nothing about the outbreak paused to wait for the review to finish, which is generally how outbreaks work, and which is presumably why the CDC counts deaths weekly instead of whenever it feels settled about them.
Governor Shapiro now blames Kennedy by name. Kennedy's office maintains the state is politicizing a tragedy. Four people are dead who were alive before any of this got reviewed, disputed, or conceded, and thirty-five years without this many measles deaths is not a talking point either side is contesting.
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By RuthThe Money Desk · the breakfast edition, 16 September 2026
They found 2.5 million kids' worth of "waste" to cut and somehow missed the $1,600 ambulance ride that's been sitting in the filing since September 7 — that's not an oversight, that's where the crackdown was aimed the whole time. Cutting kids off Medicaid doesn't cost the state a transfer fee; the ambulance loophole does the opposite, so guess which one stays open. Follow the column that didn't move.
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By LouOne More Question · the matinee edition, 16 September 2026
My nephew Anthony started law school in August, and already he talks like this is the tenth lawsuit he's read this semester, not the first. He called Sunday to tell me about a new one — a family suing Ken Paxton over a woman named Tierra Walker, who was thirty-seven, twenty weeks along, and died of preeclampsia. The lawsuit says the state's abortion ban is why. Anthony reads it to me over the phone like it's Torts 101: does the law's own text create a duty to act, or does it create a reason not to?
I wrote none of this down myself — Anthony did, on his laptop, in a file he had to hunt for twice before he found it — but there's a number in that file I keep coming back to. Nearly doubled. That's what a report says happened to ectopic pregnancy deaths in states with bans like Paxton's. Not up a little. Nearly doubled.
I'm sorry, I keep going back to that number, but look at the date on it. September 9th. One week — Anthony checked it twice — before the Walker family filed on the 16th. Not a decade of data catching up. Seven days.
He asked me something I could actually check for once: who publishes a number like that? Reporters did. ProPublica, the file said. Not a state agency. Not Paxton's office. A newsroom got there first.
I'm sorry, I keep going back to this, but it's the size of it that gets me. Nearly doubled isn't a typo you catch and fix by Tuesday. It's not a fan belt — I've had the Buick's fan belt swapped twice this year alone, and each time the guy just orders the part, puts it on, done. A number like nearly doubled isn't a part you order. Somebody has to carry it — the whole report, however many pages — from one desk to another, past people whose job it is to read it before it becomes a headline.
I'm sorry, I keep going back to this, but I keep thinking about who had to carry it. Anthony printed the ProPublica piece for me because I don't trust myself with a laptop, and it took both of us on the porch, two hands each, to keep the pages from blowing off in the wind — a dozen pages, maybe more, for one number. Nearly doubled.
The dog wanted out around then, so we stood on the porch a while, Anthony still talking, me not writing anything down because I didn't have to — Anthony had it typed. I'm sorry, one more time, because this is the last time I bring up the number on its own — nearly doubled sits in the same file as a woman the lawsuit says the same ban helped kill.
Anthony started down the steps, briefcase, no coat, and I didn't stop him — and then he turned back around and said, oh, wait, sorry, one more thing before I forget to tell you. A federal judge in Texas put a lawsuit over the abortion pill on hold, end of August. Not dismissed. Delayed. Until after the midterms.
Whose request was that, the one that moved a ruling on a medication past an election? The Department of Justice's, Anthony said, reading it off his phone this time, no laptop. I stood on the porch with the dog after he drove off, thinking about a report somebody carried down a hallway before anyone with Paxton's name on a lawsuit got around to reading it — a number that had, by then, nearly doubled.
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THE INVOICE
By RuthThe Money Desk · the supper edition, 16 September 2026
On August 31st, Attorney General Ken Paxton took issue with a colleague's arithmetic. Senator John Cornyn had called him "lazy" on the campaign trail; Paxton corrected the record on Fox News — eighteen hours a day, he said, and John Cornyn doesn't know my schedule.
Five days later, somebody else did the itemizing. Federal Election Commission filings published September 5th show Trump's super-PAC, MAGA Inc., moving $10 million to a political media company called Del Ray Media, earmarked for two attack ads against Paxton's Democratic opponent. That is not Paxton's schedule. That is the schedule of the people who work for Paxton's schedule, at ten million dollars a swing.
The same week, a Washington Examiner column ran under the headline "The GOP's Texas-sized Ken Paxton dilemma," a conservative outlet's own assessment that establishment Republicans in Texas and Washington didn't want him nominated, and got him anyway. Restated as a ledger entry: the candidate the party didn't want is the candidate the party is now defending at eight figures. That isn't a contradiction. That's the balance due.
Whatever the eighteen hours covered, the record shows time going to a case with nothing to do with the Senate campaign. On September 12th, a surrogate named McKenna West filed an emergency application asking the Supreme Court to block a custody transfer, in a case that had already drawn — the filings don't say when — Paxton's intervention. The attorney general's office found room for a surrogate dispute. Where the abortion caseload sat on that same schedule is a separate question, and the schedule doesn't answer it.
Then, on September 16th, someone filed the number that actually reconciles. The family of Tierra Walker, a 37-year-old mother who died of preeclampsia at roughly twenty weeks pregnant in late 2024, sued Paxton over his enforcement of the law they say kept her from care until it was too late. Her death predates the ad buy. It predates the surrogate filing. It predates "lazy." It did not predate the $10 million; nothing on this page did.
Here is the whole ledger, hon: one filing asks a family to prove what a law cost them, in dollars a court can count. The other asks Republican donors to prove Paxton's opponent worse, in an amount already wired. Only one of those asks came with a check attached — and it wasn't hers.
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DEATHS PENDING REVIEW
By LouOne More Question · the sunrise edition, 17 September 2026
How many people have died of measles in Pennsylvania. I asked that back in August, and I got an answer. I asked it again this week, and it came back a different shape, which is really the whole column — so let me go through it in the order I got it, and I'll apologize now for coming back to the same count as many times as I do.
On the twenty-fifth of August, the state's own health department said there had been two measles deaths, the first in thirty-five years, both unvaccinated residents of Lancaster County, out of near four hundred cases so far this year. Two. That was the shape of the answer that week.
On the first of September, the question came back through a different office. The CDC, in its own weekly count of the outbreak, said it would not be putting those two Pennsylvania deaths into the tally — not yet — because it was still investigating what had caused them. Same two deaths. Different answer. Not two. Not confirmed.
On the fourth, one of the two got confirmed as measles. The Hill's own phrase for how that happened was "following vocal skepticism from federal health officials." So the count moved again. Now it was one.
On the fifth — four days after the CDC said not yet — the Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said he accepted it. A six-week-old infant in Pennsylvania had died of measles. The Lancaster County coroner did the confirming the federal government had been waiting on. His name is Stephen Diamantoni. Four days, from "not yet" to a name, an age, and a cause.
I do a version of this counting myself most weeks, out at the toll plaza, because the car's due for a new fan belt and I don't push it past forty anymore, so I've got the time to sit there. There's a sign over the far lane that tells you how many cars have gone through since midnight. Some hours the number on the sign and the number I actually watched pass don't match, and then, later, it corrects itself all at once, like it had been waiting on something. At the plaza that's called the count catching up.
By the sixteenth, Senate Health Committee chairman Bill Cassidy — a Republican, in the President's own party — was calling the administration's handling of the outbreak a "terrible legacy," citing the deaths in Pennsylvania. Deaths, plural, from him.
By the seventeenth, Governor Shapiro said he won't take federal money for the outbreak until the CDC confirms four deaths. Four. Not two. Not one. Four.
So: how many people have died of measles in Pennsylvania. I keep asking this, I know. The state said two. The CDC said not yet. The Secretary confirmed one, with a coroner's name attached to it. The Governor is waiting on four.
Oh — one more thing, before you go. The agency the Governor is waiting on to confirm four deaths is the same agency that told me, on the first of September, it wasn't ready to confirm two. Is that still where things stand?
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By SalStaff Writer · the noon edition, 17 September 2026
Sheena Hamlin named her daughter Ellie. At around 21 weeks, doctors found Ellie's lungs so underdeveloped she would suffocate almost as soon as the cord was cut. Oklahoma law gave Hamlin and her husband nothing to do about that inside the state — the statute doesn't carve out lungs that won't work, only miscarriage, stillbirth, and death shortly after birth, and even those exceptions mean nothing if you can't act on them at home. So the family did what the law left them: they flew to Illinois before Thanksgiving 2024, paid nearly $4,000 out of pocket, and came home to bury a plan instead of a healthy delivery date. This week Hamlin filed suit in Oklahoma state court over it.
In Texas, a different family filed a different suit against a different set of names — Attorney General Ken Paxton and the hospital that treated a pregnant woman before she died — arguing the state's abortion ban is what killed her. The two cases don't share a courthouse or a docket number. They share a law professor's flowchart: what a state decides counts as an emergency, and who finds out too late that it didn't.
A week earlier, in Texas's tight race for governor, a Democrat named Gina Hinojosa ran a campaign ad about giving birth despite her own child's fatal genetic anomaly. The ad never says Texas law no longer lets a woman in her position choose otherwise. It didn't have to. The viewer already knows a court filing when they see one, even dressed up as a thirty-second spot.
The drug that would let any of these women make the call in a doctor's office instead of a courtroom is still sitting with Judge Reed O'Connor in the Northern District of Texas. On August 31, the Justice Department asked him to pause the lawsuit seeking to revoke mifepristone's FDA approval. He granted it — the case now runs past the midterms, and O'Connor left the door open for the Trump administration to restrict the drug once he rules.
None of this started this year. In 2012 the Oklahoma Supreme Court struck down a personhood amendment unanimously, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review it, and the fight moved to exactly where it sits now: state by state, family by family, filing by filing, with the mifepristone case that could resolve all of it still open on Judge O'Connor's docket.
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THE FRIEND LIST
By ChipStaff Writer · the supper edition, 17 September 2026
He tells the cranks they've got a friend in the White House the same week a coroner's posting a measles death to Facebook because nobody built him a better system. That's not an oversight, that's the org chart working exactly as designed — the CDC doesn't even have to say no to Pennsylvania, it just has to keep not saying yes while its boss is out stacking the panel with his people. A six-week-old is dead and the guy in charge of counting that is busy deciding who gets a seat at the table.
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