Coroner Disputes Pa. Measles Deaths; Kennedy Piles On

Kennedy said Shapiro was not cooperating with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or with the county. Shapiro administration staff told the Inquirer the department has been in regular contact with the CDC throughout the outbreak.

Shapiro said Kennedy was spreading misinformation about vaccine safety and scaring parents. Kennedy replied on X that the governor was "gaslighting" him and said the state's vaccination rates fell mostly during the Biden administration. Shapiro noted Kennedy had visited Lancaster in 2021 and told a crowd measles could be cured by "chicken soup and vitamin A" — there is no specific treatment for measles, and vitamin A neither prevents nor cures it.

State Sen. Scott Martin, a Lancaster County Republican, called the announcement a "media event" he was not told about in advance. "We have not been able to independently verify what they reported," he told The Center Square. Republican Rep. Dave Zimmerman said the administration "absolutely" should release more information and pointed to his bill requiring the Health Department to give county officials county-level outbreak data.

Parsons posted again Wednesday morning: "So as of right now, we have ZERO information that corroborates the idea that there were two measles deaths in Lancaster County. Again, everything stated could be accurate. But no one in authority has been able to say that... Transparency is owed to the people."

Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine safety expert at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said the coroner's account "doesn't really give us more information." He said measles can enlarge the spleen and that birth can rupture an enlarged spleen, and that the coroner should offer an alternate explanation for the rupture if measles was not the cause. Offit said state health officials told him "these patients would not have died were it not for measles," and faulted the state for withholding details: "You're making it a lot easier for them when you don't give more information."

Diamantoni said his office is still investigating what caused the rupture, that the autopsy did not note an enlarged spleen, and that he is trying to learn whether the baby's mother had measles when she gave birth. He said state health officials had not contacted him personally as of Wednesday, though his chief deputy spoke with the department before Tuesday's news conference.