Two Pennsylvania residents have died after contracting measles, the first such deaths in the state in 35 years and the first reported in the United States this year. The deaths prompted Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) to sharply confront the nation’s health secretary over federal vaccine messaging that he said is confusing and harmful.
Both the people who died were residents of Lancaster County. The Pennsylvania Health Department declined to release their ages or other information, citing the privacy of the people and their families.
Pennsylvania has confirmed 393 measles cases in 28 counties this year, including 86 in the past week. Nearly half of the cases are in Lancaster County, authorities said. Seventy people, nearly 20 percent of those infected, have been hospitalized, Shapiro said, and every confirmed case has occurred in someone who was not fully vaccinated.
“We hope and we pray that those deaths will be the last,” Shapiro said at a news conference Tuesday.
Shapiro, widely seen as a presidential contender, said he was late to the news conference because he had been speaking by phone with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“I was very, very blunt with him,” the governor said. “Made very clear that his actions and the rhetoric that’s coming from this administration are having a negative impact on communities across America, particularly right here in Pennsylvania.”
Shapiro said Kennedy’s statements were confusing parents and making it harder for them to know whom to trust. “There’s real-life consequences to spreading misinformation. There’s real-life consequences to scaring people and not relying on actual doctors, actual medical professionals, to provide unbiased information to parents so that we can make reasonable decisions for our kids,” he said.
The federal government’s public health decisions are not driven by facts and science, Shapiro said. That makes it even more confusing for parents. “All we want to do as parents is what is right for our kids,” he said.
A spokesperson for the Health and Human Services Department did not respond to a request for comment about Shapiro’s criticisms. But Emily Hilliard, senior press secretary, said in a statement that HHS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extend their condolences to the families and communities affected by the two measles-associated deaths in Lancaster County.
CDC is working closely with state and local health departments to strengthen response efforts, support affected communities in the state, and communicate the steps people can take to slow the spread of measles, the statement said. “The MMR vaccine provides the most effective protection against measles and helps prevent its spread,” it said.
Kennedy has acknowledged that “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine” and that parents should get their kids vaccinated for measles. But he had also falsely stated that vaccines were not safety-tested.
Pennsylvania Health Secretary Debra Bogen said the deaths underscore how unfamiliar many people have become with a disease that had been largely eliminated from the state for more than three decades.
“People are not familiar with this disease and don’t fully understand the potential severity of the illness,” she said. People have forgotten how serious measles can be for the very young, pregnant women, the very old, and people with compromised immune systems, health officials have said.
Bogen added, referring to the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine: “As a physician, I want to make sure that people understand that the MMR vaccine is safe and provides the best protection we have against measles.”
The U.S. has reported the most measles cases in any year since 1991, surpassing all of last year’s total and reaching the highest level in 35 years with months of the year left to go.
Measles is a contagious, vaccine-preventable disease. Most children recover after several days of fever, cough, congestion and pink eye, but measles can also cause pneumonia, brain swelling, deafness, intellectual disability and death.
Since an unvaccinated child in West Texas developed measles early last year, successive outbreaks have sickened thousands of people, with repeated new infections igniting sustained outbreaks in multiple states rather than staying concentrated in a few undervaccinated communities.
Measles-associated deaths had become extraordinarily rare in the U.S. The first death in the 2025 outbreaks — that of an unvaccinated school-age child in Texas — was the nation’s first reported measles death since 2015. By the end of last year, three people had died: two unvaccinated school-age children in Texas and an unvaccinated adult in New Mexico. The Pennsylvania deaths bring the number reported since the beginning of 2025 to five.
Measles is one of the most contagious diseases on Earth, with the virus spreading through the air. About 1 in 5 unvaccinated people in the U.S. who get measles is hospitalized, according to the CDC.
A measles infection can damage the immune cells that help the body protect against other viruses and bacteria it has encountered before, putting a person at higher risk of getting sick from other infections even after they have recovered.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends routine immunization against measles starting at age 1 and early vaccination for children as young as 6 months old who are living in or traveling to a community where there is an outbreak.
“In 2026, decades after measles was eliminated in the United States, it is heartbreaking to witness deaths from a disease that is preventable with a vaccine that has been widely used since the 1970s,” AAP President Andrew Racine said in a statement.
“It’s just extraordinarily sad to have a loved one die of essentially a preventable disease in the United States in 2026,” Racine said in an interview. The U.S. eliminated measles in 2000, he said, “and now we find ourselves back in a situation in which we’re having not only thousands of cases throughout the United States, but, inevitably, we’re having people die of it.”
Lancaster County is home to the largest population of Amish in the U.S., and the MMR vaccination rate among the county’s Amish community was estimated to be around 25 percent, according to data from the state health department from the 2023-2024 school year.
Communities generally need vaccination rates of about 95 percent to prevent outbreaks and protect the vulnerable.
Shapiro warned against treating the outbreak as a problem confined to Lancaster County’s Amish or Mennonite communities, saying measles “does not respect county lines or religious lines.” Cases have been found in communities with different religious, political and demographic makeups across the state, he said.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump issued a sweeping executive order that amounted to his most significant attempt to reshape how Americans vaccinate their children. It included directives for cutting the number of recommended childhood vaccines, spacing out those shots and other major changes. Trump’s asks are not in effect, but they have sparked swift and fierce pushback from major medical associations, which fear a resurgence of preventable diseases.
The executive order keeps measles, mumps and rubella among the diseases for which vaccination is universally recommended. But it calls for administering them as three separate shots, currently unavailable in the U.S.
The potential changes would diverge from long-standing federal guidance around immunizations, which medical experts credit with halting the spread of deadly preventable diseases in the country. In addition, state and local authorities, not the federal government, generally set vaccination requirements for school attendance.
Medical experts say there is no evidence that children benefit from separating the MMR vaccine, which has been extensively studied and found to be safe and effective. Those pushing back against Trump’s order say requiring three injections and potentially additional medical appointments could cause children to receive shots late or miss them entirely, leaving them vulnerable to measles and other diseases for longer.
The proposal comes as children return to classrooms, where measles can spread rapidly among those who are not protected. Two doses of the MMR vaccine are 97 percent effective against measles.
That protection has continued to erode. During the 2025-2026 school year, a record 4.2 percent of kindergartners — about 155,000 children — had an exemption from at least one required vaccine, up from 3.6 percent the year before, according to federal data. Exemptions increased in 41 states and the District of Columbia, and 24 states reported exemption rates above 5 percent. Nationwide, MMR coverage among kindergartners fell to 92.4 percent, with about 280,000 attending school without documentation that they had completed the vaccine series.
In Pennsylvania, Shapiro said, the number of families seeking vaccine exemptions for philosophical and religious reasons has tripled in the past 10 years, leading to lower vaccination rates and dramatically reduced protection for others in the community.
Trump was pressed on his claim earlier this month that the MMR vaccine, taken together, could be “quite lethal.” He did not cite scientific evidence, saying there are “some people that say it is that way.”
On CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Mehmet Oz, the Medicare and Medicaid chief, said in response to repeated questioning that the MMR vaccine is “not a lethal vaccine.”
Trump has long questioned whether the number of childhood vaccines can cause autism, despite decades of research finding no link. But his musings have become more vocal during his second term amid the selection of Kennedy as the nation’s top health official. Kennedy is the founder of a prominent anti-vaccine group and has a lengthy history of disparaging vaccines.
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