Amish Country Is Seeing a Major Measles Outbreak. RFK Jr. Is Making It Worse.

Five years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. traveled to Amish country, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to address a large anti-vaccination crowd. It was 2021 and the COVID pandemic was still raging; the anti-vaxxer spoke to a crowd of 1,500 people, mocked vaccinations in general, and told them that the cure for measles was chicken soup and vitamin A.

Already primed by their religious beliefs to be suspicious of vaccinations, Kennedy’s Amish and Mennonite audience, known as part of Pennsylvania’s Plain People community, was a ripe target for his anti-vaccine message. In the years since, the number of unvaccinated residents has soared, and so too has the incidence of measles. Kennedy is now secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in which capacity he has continued to undermine confidence in vaccines, including the MMR vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella, and has presided over a resurgence of diseases that, for decades, had been successfully corralled. In the first eight months of 2026, Lancaster County alone reported more than 200 measles cases. Meanwhile, a CDC report released last week documented over 3,000 confirmed measles cases nationally in 2026, the first time the U.S. has exceeded that threshold since 1991.

Dr. Holmes Morton, a pediatric specialist in genetic disorders who has worked with the Plain People for four decades and won a MacArthur Foundation genius fellowship for this work in 2006, is furious at what he is seeing. Morton’s mother and several of her siblings caught measles as teenagers in the late 1930s, and all subsequently became deaf, needing multiple surgeries to try to restore their hearing.

That personal story has likely impacted Morton’s life choices: Over the past half century, he has made it his mission to convince vaccine skeptics, especially those with genetic disorders common among the Amish — diseases such as pyruvate kinase deficiency that predispose them to particularly serious reactions to an array of infections — of the benefits of vaccines. He also set up the Clinic for Special Children in Lancaster County, in 1989, and, more recently, the Central Pennsylvania Clinic in nearby Mifflin County, which provides medical care for people with special needs caused by genetic disorders. Now, he sees his work being undermined by RFK Jr.

: “He doesn’t think clearly,” Morton said of the health secretary in an interview with Truthout. “He’s not a scientist. He’s a lawyer, and he’s a source of bad advice. The whole chaos of the Trump administration has fostered that in every direction.”

On August 25, the Pennsylvania department of public health reported two measles-related deaths in the county. Given that, according to the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, at most 0.3 percent of measles cases in the U.S. will result in death, experts such as Dr. Paul Offit, director of the vaccine education center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, believe that the real incidence of measles in the county is likely up to five times higher than the reported rate. Recently, Dr. Morton was called to a farm in Mifflin County where both parents and all eight of their children were suffering from measles; it was the first cases he had seen since 1983. What particularly worried him, given measles’ virulence, was that they weren’t isolating —instead, they were planning on going to church, to the market, and to school.

With such a prevalence of measles, just as the new academic year is starting and kids are returning to school, Offit argues that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) should be spearheading an all-hands-on-deck effort to educate parents about the importance of vaccinations. “Kids are heading back to school, where it’s easy to share viruses,” Offit told Truthout. “It’s going to get much worse. Wait till we get to December, January, February.” The World Health Organization, which the Trump administration withdrew from early this year, estimates that for every person infected with measles, 18 secondary infections are likely to result — meaning that schools could soon see an exponential growth in measles cases. Yet instead of sending out additional teams of specialists to encourage vaccinations in places such as Lancaster County, the CDC’s leadership is bowing to political pressures to trash-talk the Pennsylvania public health system and dismiss the seriousness of an outbreak that, nationally, has seen more measles cases and deaths in the past two years than in the preceding quarter century. To Offit, this is further proof that under the Trump administration, “The CDC, FDA, and NIH are compromised.”

Back in June, as she was seeking Senate confirmation to become CDC director, Dr. Erica Schwartz promised senators that she would “follow the science where it leads.” But when pressed on whether she would resist anti-scientific orders from HHS Secretary RFK Jr., she equivocated, saying simply that she didn’t believe Kennedy would push such orders on her.

For GOP senators who have repeatedly twisted themselves into pretzels when finding excuses to confirm one after another of Trump’s patently unqualified or cowardly nominees, Schwartz’s answers were just about enough to get her over the finish line. In the end, 51 senators voted to confirm her leadership of the CDC.

Months later, with the intensification of the measles outbreak, Schwartz has shown just how hollow her promises were. In late August, the Pennsylvania health department confirmed two measles-related deaths in Lancaster County. They didn’t, however, provide details about the deaths — which created an opening for anti-vaxxers. Within days, Kennedy was pushing back against the state’s conclusions and claiming that Governor Josh Shapiro and his team were grandstanding on the issue — and that they might even have “fabricated” the deaths.

This was nonsense. While details on one of the deaths remain unpublished, media reports on the other suggest the victim was a newborn baby boy who had been infected in the womb by his unvaccinated mother. The immediate cause of death, the coroner found, was not the measles that he was suffering from but was a ruptured spleen — yet according to Offit, this is a well-known, and potentially deadly, side effect of measles. “This baby died because the mother had measles and he had measles,” Offit explained to Truthout.

Pennsylvania’s public health team was certainly convinced that measles was a contributing factor in the infant’s death and duly reported it to the CDC. Despite this, the agency, which did not respond to a request for comment for this article, announced last week that it was unsure as to whether measles had led to the two Pennsylvania deaths, and in an unprecedented move it removed them from national data on measles fatalities in 2026. Several media outlets reported that the action was directly ordered by Schwartz, who herself was likely attempting to stay in her boss RFK Jr.’s good books.

A growing number of doctors around the country have expressed their outrage at this manipulation of data. For Offit, the saga speaks to the danger of having a man with Kennedy’s views on vaccines overseeing the nation’s public health systems. “He’s always downplaying these cases,” said the Philadelphia pediatrician. “That’s who he is. If you are going to cause children to be hospitalized and die, you have to downplay these cases.” As for Dr. Schwartz, Offit is equally scathing. “She isn’t speaking truth to power. Erica Schwartz should be talking about this, holding press conferences every day, saying this [the measles epidemic] is about to get much worse.”