A six-week-old girl in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, died of measles, the county coroner confirmed on Friday, undercutting Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s baseless suggestion that the state's two infant measles deaths may have been 'fabricated.' Coroner Stephen Diamantoni told Lancaster Online the baby died at home, likely on August 18. He noted the infant had Amish lethal microcephaly, a genetic condition caused by a mutation in the SLC25A19 gene that affects about one in 500 babies in the Old Order Amish population; affected infants typically survive only about six months. Measles, he said, was the cause of death.
The girl is one of two infants whose deaths Pennsylvania announced last week as measles fatalities. The other, a newborn boy from an Amish family, was born with a pulse but not breathing and died within half an hour; his mother was severely ill with measles. He tested positive, with evidence of infection in his lungs, but Diamantoni said a pathologist attributed the death to a ruptured spleen. Dr. Paul Offit of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia disputes that: measles can enlarge the spleen, ruptures are extremely rare in newborns, and no alternative explanation has been made public. Both babies, he said, would not have died but for measles.
Kennedy had claimed without evidence that the state may have 'fabricated' the deaths, then ordered CDC Director Erica Schwartz to remove them from agency data after staff had already accepted them as measles deaths. They remain off the public CDC dashboard — the asterisk note now says federal death records for 2026 do not list measles as the underlying cause — though an internal database still includes them. Governor Josh Shapiro responded: "It's long past time for RFK to stop playing games with people's lives."
