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Measles killed 6-week-old baby, coroner confirms after RFK Jr. disputed deaths
“It’s long past time for RFK to stop playing games with people’s lives.”
A six-week-old baby girl in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, died from measles, the county coroner confirmed to local press on Friday.
Stephen Diamantoni, a Republican elected coroner in 2007, told Lancaster Online that the baby died at home. “I believe it was the 18th of August,” he said.
He also noted that the baby had a genetic condition called Amish lethal microcephaly, in which babies are born with unusually small heads and underdeveloped brains. The condition is caused by a mutation in the SLC25A19 gene, which codes for a protein involved with energy-producing enzymes in the mitochondria and is thought to be important for brain development. About 1 in 500 babies in the Old Order Amish population of Pennsylvania is born with the condition. Infants with the disorder only survive for about six months.
Diamontoni confirmed to Lancaster Online that while microcephaly was present, measles was the cause of death.
The death is one of two that the state’s health department announced last week as being from measles, according to a response from the state health department sent to Ars Technica Friday. Additionally on Friday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro shared a local news report about the coroner’s confirmation on social media. In the post, he also seemed to confirm that it was one of the deaths reported by state health officials.
The tragic deaths—both in infants, the other a newborn boy—have been engulfed in a firestorm of controversy sparked when anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed without evidence that the state may have “fabricated” them. The controversy was fueled by Diamantoni himself, who said he had not received the death reports at the time of the state’s announcement, seemingly adding to Kennedy’s false claim that the deaths were not real. But Lancaster County does not have its own health department and relies on information sent from the state health department.
Earlier this week, Diamantoni said his office had only recently received the report from the state about the baby girl’s death, telling reporters at the time only that it was of a “child.”
Amid a heated exchange with Shapiro, Kennedy ordered Erica Schwartz, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to remove the deaths from the agency’s data. CDC staff had already accepted the deaths as being from measles and had reported them as such. Schwartz reportedly removed them from the public website without objection, though a report on Thursday revealed they are still included in an internal CDC database.
The deaths remain excluded from the CDC’s public-facing data as of Friday afternoon, with only an asterisk in the chart where 2026 measles deaths would be reported. But the page was updated Friday to change the meaning of the asterisk. Previously, the asterisk linked to a note that read, in part: “available information does not establish whether measles caused or contributed to the deaths or whether the individuals died from other causes while infected with measles.” That note is gone, replaced by one saying: “The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) does not currently have any death records from 2026 that indicate measles is the underlying cause.”