“Pennsylvania reports fifth measles death as US outbreak escalates”, 30 September 2026 (Photo via Washington Examiner — the original report)
As it ran on the front
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did the responsible thing on September 1, when it left two measles-associated deaths out of Pennsylvania's count on the weekly outbreak report, pending its own review. That's not a cover-up, that's rigor — you don't publish a cause of death before you've confirmed it, except the Lancaster County coroner had already confirmed one of the two by the time the CDC's statement went out. So the review wasn't about whether the deaths happened. It was about whether the agency's own tally would say so.
Thirteen days later, on September 14, a coroner in Jefferson County reported a third measles-associated death in the state. Governor Josh Shapiro pointed at HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. by name over it, which — look, that's politics, that's not a data problem — actually, that's exactly what you say when the number you're waiting on from Washington is a number your own state's coroners finished weeks ago.…
…(cont) The week of September 15 carried two separate records, and they are not the same record: the national case count was at its highest in 35 years, and the national death toll was already running higher than any year since 1992. Two charts, two lines, two different kinds of worst. I want to be precise about that, because precision was the entire justification for making anyone wait on a review in the first place.
On September 30, Pennsylvania reported its fifth measles death — an unvaccinated Lancaster County resident — and the national case count passed 3,500. Five deaths in a state that had four two weeks earlier, and this fifth one went out the door with no review attached at all, just reported. I'd like to tell you where, in those twenty-nine days, the federal side closed the distance between its number and the state's. I can't find where. The number the CDC was reviewing on September 1 was a number Pennsylvania's coroners already had. It was always there. We were just waiting on a form to catch up to a body.
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“They had a number on September 1st and sat on it for a review that has never once shown up finished in anything they've put out since. The state kept counting its own dead in real time while the federal line sat still, and the gap between those two numbers is exactly the size of however much blame somebody doesn't want attached to a vaccine fight. That's not a data lag, that's a muzzle with a press release stapled to it.”
“Look, the CDC wasn't hiding anything, they were reviewing it, that's due diligence — the coroner had already signed the certificate, sure, but that's not the same thing as the federal government saying it, okay, it's basically the same thing, but there's a process, you have to have a process. Pennsylvania's numbers run ahead of the federal numbers because state and federal reporting works on different timelines, that's not a scandal, that's just how — I mean, it's measles, we've known how to count measles deaths since before some of these parents were born, but sure, timelines. The paperwork just needs time to catch up to the bodies, that's all this is.”
Pennsylvania reported its fifth measles death on Wednesday as the disease outbreak continues to grow across the United States with more than 3,500 cases. “PA DOH is in regular contact with the CDC and today reported that an unvaccinated resident of Lancaster County who tested positive for measles has died. PA DOH also reported the […]
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