Politicians need to stop holding press conferences every time someone dies of measles

(But they probably won’t.)

Note: I was wondering if I had more to say about the Pennsylvania measles cases when Joe Nocera of The Free Press emailed me and suggested I did! He was right. Here it is (they are running it too).

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For a week, the federal government and the state of Pennsylvania have been embroiled in a fight over whether a measles outbreak killed two state residents, leading to countless articles asking, among other questions, if a mother’s measles can cause a fatal lacerated spleen in an infant (the answer: unlikely).

Now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is insisting on reviewing the two cases before it agrees the deaths were measles-related, provoking a new round of questions about whether the CDC should be second-guessing the state’s report (the answer: yes).

Yet nobody has asked the most crucial question of all: Why did the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, hold a press conference to announce these deaths?

To put it another way: Why is every measles death now national news? Using a press conference to alert a population of a measles outbreak makes sense. Residents should know if they’ve been exposed, especially if they’re unvaccinated.

Announcing individual measles deaths is pure political and public health (to the extent those ideas can even be separated) theater.

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Measles is not new.

Written accounts of it date at least to the 9th century, according to the CDC. Nor is it terribly dangerous. Vaccinated Americans are largely protected from it because the MMR vaccine is long-lasting and effective (unlike, say, mRNA Covid shots). Even unvaccinated Americans will generally recover quickly from a bout with measles, though obviously they face far higher odds of getting the disease than people who have been immunized.

At the same time, no one disputes that measles can—albeit rarely—be fatal.

Governors don’t hold press conferences to tell people that driving can be risky every time someone dies in a car accident. Or to warn people to stay inside during thunderstorms every time someone dies from a lightning strike. And if they did, news outlets would ignore them.

So why did Shapiro, the Democratic governor of the fifth-most populous state in the U.S., decide he personally needed to make sure the world knew about two deaths from a disease that is neither novel nor particularly dangerous?

Two reasons.

Partly it was to push unvaccinated people to get shots—though his effort is as likely to produce a backlash by making them feel like pawns in a larger political battle as to convince them.

But his primary reason was to score points with the media and Democrats against Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Donald Trump. The tell came when Shapiro, who has potential presidential ambitions, revealed the deaths occurred in unvaccinated people—but then wouldn’t say anything else about them, supposedly to protect the privacy of the patients.

Shapiro’s move was transparently cynical. Now it has backfired.

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The publicly available information suggests Shapiro and the Pennsylvania health department overreached in blaming measles for the deaths. In one case, we know only that an infant died of a lacerated spleen, which is not a typical measles complication. Nothing at all has been revealed about the other case, except that the death occurred in a person unvaccinated against measles.

Thus the CDC has every right to demand more information before adding the deaths to a national dashboard it maintains to track measles outbreaks. In 2025, anti-vaccine groups claimed measles had not actually killed two unvaccinated children in Texas. The CDC correctly ignored them and added both deaths to the dashboard.

This time, the cases are far more ambiguous. And the legacy media is trying to protect Shapiro by suggesting the CDC shouldn’t review them at all—claiming, as The New York Times put it, that it was “highly unusual” for the CDC to second-guess a state public health agency. The implication was that the new CDC director, Dr. Erica Schwartz, was not pushing back against Kennedy, as she had vowed to do during her confirmation hearing.

But either it matters that we know what caused the deaths, or it doesn’t. The CDC can and should make sure it has the full truth about both cases, especially since this is not a time-sensitive emergency.

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(The only emergency is William Shatner’s smoldering stare!)

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Hanging over these two cases, of course, is the shadow of Covid-19.

From 2020 to 2022, when hundreds and even thousands of Covid deaths were being reported a day, pathologists could not examine each case in detail to determine what role the novel coronavirus played. Had the patient died “from Covid” or “with Covid”? The answer didn’t matter. Pathologists had to rely on rules established by the CDC and the World Health Organization that essentially said anyone who died after a positive Covid test (and even some people who didn’t) would be listed as dying from Covid. In fact, as many as 30 to 40 percent of reported Covid deaths may have been incidental, and fights over the real number persist even now.

Covid is real and sometimes dangerous. So is measles. And the fact that sporadic outbreaks are popping up after decades in which the measles virus had been declared eliminated in the U.S. has understandably grabbed the attention of many Americans.

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But measles is not a major public health threat, and measles vaccination rates in kids remain high and essentially unchanged.

Yet once again, the public health establishment, Democratic politicians, and the legacy media are doing everything possible to turn a relatively mild illness for most people into the second coming of the plague. They simply cannot help themselves. They have the infrastructure and megaphones, and they want to use both.

The bureaucrats are still big. It’s the epidemics that got small.