The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday said it would not include two measles-associated deaths in Pennsylvania in the federal agency’s weekly outbreak update, explaining it is still investigating the cause of the deaths…
Page A12From§Eachthe late evening edition — 31 August 2026
CDC omits Pennsylvania's measles deaths from its weekly count, citing an ongoing review.
As it ran on the front
Follow along, friends, because this one's got a page number. The Centers for Disease Control keeps a weekly measles dashboard, the kind of chart a nervous school nurse checks before first bell, and this week it published its usual tally with a footnote: Pennsylvania's dead are not in it. Not disputed, not disproven - just, per the agency's own release, omitted, pending review. The Washington Post went and asked why, because that is the Post's job, and got a follow-up: two specific deaths, confirmed by the state, still absent from the federal database days later. No press conference. No release walking it back. Just a number that is smaller than the real number, sitting on a government website with the calm authority of a government website.
All together now - line one of the dashboard, the header: 'Confirmed Cases and Deaths, United States, Current as of [date].' Current as of the date is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. It is current the way a photograph from three exposures ago is current. Let's call the reviewing official, for the sake of the story and no one's actual name, Dr. Pending Review - a title, not a person, and I mean that with the sincerest respect an institution can be owed. Dr. Pending Review has, per the record, not added the two deaths. Dr. Pending Review has not said when. The review reviews on.…
…(cont) I want to be careful here, because I am always careful here: nobody in this story is accused of hiding a body. The bodies are, tragically, accounted for - by the state of Pennsylvania, in public records, this week. What is unaccounted for is two lines in a federal spreadsheet, and the agency's own explanation for the gap is the word 'review,' unadorned, undated, doing the job a wall usually does.
All together now, one more time - the header again, because it's worth a second pass: 'Current as of.' A measles count is supposed to be the simplest kind of arithmetic there is: how many kids got sick, how many did not make it. The CDC's own weekly filing says the second number is smaller than the confirmed number, and the only citation given is itself. That is not a conspiracy. That is a dashboard that undercounts and annotates its own gap, politely, in a footnote most of us never scroll to.
Follow along next week, same chart, same header, and see whether line one still reads current, and whether the two names Pennsylvania already filed have made it into the federal column yet. This reporter will be checking the date stamp before he checks the count, and would gently suggest you do the same.
“They didn't lose the count, they paused it, and 'pending review' is the polite word for that. Two dead kids in Pennsylvania are sitting in a state file while the federal dashboard still says 'current as of' this week. That gap is the whole ballgame - it's not what they counted, it's what they decided not to count yet.”
“The agency is following its own data verification protocol, which sometimes means a confirmed death takes a few extra days to appear in a national database - that's just good practice, not a cover-up. I mean, I'm not saying two specific names sitting in 'pending' this long is normal, I'm saying - actually I don't have the timeline in front of me, let's circle back.”
The receipts
The US declared measles eliminated in 2000. The last two years carry more cases than the rest of the century combined - the worst count since 1991 The Hill / CDC measles data, July 2026
The CDC hasn’t added 2 deaths to its measles database. Here’s why.The deaths have been at the heart of a bitter political dispute between RFK Jr. and Gov. Josh Shapiro (D).
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.