Pennsylvania Governor Announces Two Measles-Associated Deaths Amid Ongoing Outbreak
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Measles outbreaks around the country are already a disaster, but more bad news arrived on Tuesday. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro announced that two measles-associated deaths had occurred in Lancaster County. “These mark the first deaths related to measles within the Commonwealth in 35 years,” an accompanying statement declared. Both individuals were said to have been unvaccinated, but the state Health Department declined to release any other information about the cases, citing privacy concerns.
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BreitbartPennsylvania death number two from the measles has not been confirmed, and Pennsylvania health officials are outright lying about why the Lancaster County coroner’s office has no record of any deaths from measles.
NBC NewsAfter the Pennsylvania Health Department announced Wednesday that one of the two people whose deaths in the state were associated with measles was an infant, the coroner involved in the case has said he does not consider measles to be the cause of death.
HuffPost“As a pediatrician with more than 30 years of caring for children, I have thoroughly reviewed the case investigation information and sadly can confirm that there were two recent measles-associated deaths in Lancaster County, which were reported to the CDC’s measles response team early Tuesday morning,” she said in a statement.
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It is still unclear whether measles played a role in the infant’s death. An infection can cause the spleen to enlarge — which raises the risk of rupture — but that could be difficult to detect in an autopsy after a rupture has occurred. Diamantoni, a Republican who has held the elected position since 2008, said he did not find evidence that the infant’s spleen was enlarged.
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The AtlanticHere’s what we know so far: In the one case for which additional information has been released, an infant whose lab tests showed evidence of a measles infection died shortly after birth because of a lacerated spleen. According to an interview with the county coroner conducted by The Philadelphia Inquirer, a forensic pathologist decided that this fatal injury was not related to the infection.
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Kennedy has repeatedly denied having any responsibility for measles outbreaks. Indeed, he is neither the underlying nor the immediate cause of the country’s current crisis. Vaccine doubts have been around as long as the shots themselves, and immunization rates had begun to decline, at least a bit, before Kennedy became HHS secretary. But another part of a death certificate is relevant here: a listing of any significant conditions that contributed to a patient’s death. There is no doubt that Kennedy’s years as a prominent anti-vaccine activist and his actions since taking office have misinformed the public about immunizations.
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HuffPostKennedy, one of the most prominent vaccine skeptics in the country, has been sparring with Shapiro following the announcement of the two measles-associated deaths.
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Independent claims that didn't surface elsewhere in our corpus. Treat as supplementary — not corroborated across outlets.
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01 The Hill Trump officials cast doubt on Pennsylvania measles death claims Top Trump administration health officials are openly questioning the circumstances of two deaths that Pennsylvania officials attributed to measles. “We don’t know exactly what happened in Pennsylvania yet,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in an interview Thursday on Fox Business.   “We don’t know if the children died…
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02 NBC News The health secretary, Dr. Debra Bogen, expressed confidence Wednesday in her department’s conclusion that the death was “measles-associated,” a term that means there was laboratory or epidemiologic evidence of a measles infection.
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03 The Atlantic As a pathologist, I am used to fielding questions about how and why people die. Such calls were particularly frequent during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when many people doubted COVID-19’s official death toll. Some alleged that anyone who merely happened to die while infected—in a car crash, let’s say, or from cancer—was being counted in official numbers. (In fact, government statistics were underestimating the number of Americans who were dying from COVID.) Admittedly, determining why someone died is in many cases difficult for experts such as myself. The body is a frustratingly complex machine. A mild illness can lead to a cascade of severe bodily dysfunction; disparate diseases may all crop up simultaneously.
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04 HuffPost In a post on X, formerly Twitter, from his official government account, Kennedy criticized Shapiro over a Tuesday press conference in which the governor discussed the ongoing measles outbreak in Pennsylvania, including the fatalities in Lancaster County.
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05 Breitbart The word “from” matters. “I want to be clear: this illness and death from measles is completely preventable,” Philly Voice quotes the governor as saying from a podium set up at a local hospital in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
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