Page A3From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 1 September 2026
As it ran on the front
Let's be clear: the Centers for Disease Control did not omit the Pennsylvania measles deaths from its weekly tally. The agency simply held those two deaths pending review, which is standard practice, which is completely normal, which — okay, it is not standard practice, nobody sits on a death count for weeks while the headlines run without it, but that's not the point I'm making.
The point is transparency. The CDC has been fully transparent about the fact that it hasn't been transparent, and it explained that in a public post about why the numbers you're reading are not the numbers that exist. That's not obfuscation, that's methodology. Did I say obfuscation? Strike that, I meant — I don't know what I meant.…
…(cont) Look at it from the agency's perspective. You have a weekly measles update, a public dashboard, a real disease moving through real communities, and two deaths that for reasons of process — cause-of-death confirmation, jurisdictional sign-off, the usual paperwork — haven't cleared the queue. That's not hiding a body count, that's respecting the sanctity of the count. We take death seriously here, which is why we're taking our time counting it.
Some will ask why a pending review takes longer than the outbreak it's reviewing. Fair question. The honest answer is that public health data moves at the speed of public health bureaucracy, and — I want to be careful here — that speed has not, historically, been described as a strength. It has been described, by people who study this exact thing, as a strength. That's what I meant to say. It has been described as a strength.
The Washington Post ran a piece explaining, in detail, why the database hasn't added the two deaths. We didn't ask them to write that piece. We are, however, extremely comfortable with it existing, in the same way you're comfortable with a smoke detector once you've already left the building.
So no, there is no discrepancy between what the CDC counted and what happened. There is a discrepancy between what happened and what the CDC has said happened, and a review is underway to determine whether that discrepancy is a discrepancy. I'm told it is. I'm told it is not. I'm told to stop talking now.
“They pulled the dead off the board like erasing a whiteboard, then wrote a memo about penmanship. That's not transparency, that's data laundering with a press release attached. Ask your local health department if the number they're counting is the number that's real.”
“The CDC did not omit anything, the data was simply held pending review, which is standard practice — did I say standard, I meant unusual, which we are reviewing the unusualness of. Look, transparency is our top priority, we're just... reviewing the priority.”
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
CDC omits Pennsylvania measles deaths from weekly update pending reviewThe 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…
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.