UPDATE: The Pennsylvania measles debacle worsens

The second “measles-associated” death came in an infant with a fatal genetic disorder who would have died in months. Blaming measles defies belief. Amazingly, governor Josh Shapiro won’t back down.

The dishonesty and hypocrisy surrounding the two “measles-associated” deaths in Pennsylvania are even worse than they first seemed.

Yesterday, the coroner in the county where the deaths took place reported the details of the second death, which Pennsylvania’s governor had previously refused to disclose. The death occurred in a six-week-old infant girl with a genetic disorder called “Amish lethal microencephalopathy.” The disorder causes a severely shrunken head and brain. Children who have it die within a few months of birth.

Because measles caused the respiratory crisis that killed the baby, it technically was an underlying cause of her death, according to Lancaster County coroner Dr. Stephen Diamantoni. But in an interview with a local news outlet called Lancaster Online, Diamantoni made the truth of the case clear:

Children [with Amish lethal microencephalopahy] are sick from birth and actually are placed on palliative care from the time of birth. They typically only live 5 or 6 months of age and the majority of those children die as a result of a respiratory infection of any kind, because their brain is very small and they don’t have the capacity to fight those infections well.

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Diamantoni appears to take his job seriously and ethically. He previously refused to classify another death in a Lancaster County infant as measles-related after finding no evidence that measles played a role in the ruptured spleen that killed the infant.

His finding about the second death is correct under the Center for Disease Control’s standard rules for cause-of-death classifications. Those say an “underlying cause of death is the disease or injury which initiated the train of morbid events leading directly or indirectly to death.”

In this case, had the baby not contracted measles, she would have lived until a cold or the flu (or even Covid) killed her a few months later. Measles belongs on her death certificate.

Still, to pretend that measles actually killed this infant defies belief.

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(Setting the record straight. With your help.)

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Yet that’s exactly what the legacy media and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat with White House aspirations, continued to do yesterday.

In a post on X, Shapiro linked to the Lancaster Online article about the second death and accused Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of “playing games” (!) with the death.

Meanwhile, the New York Times and other legacy media outlets ran headlines like “Six-Week-Old Infant Died From Measles, Lancaster Coroner Says” — without explaining the crucial fact of the baby’s fatal illness until later.

This case is “with Covid” versus “from Covid” on steroids, the measles equivalent of a 90-year-old in a hospice in 2021 who tested positive for Covid and wound up added to the Covid death counters that CNN happily ran.

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(I’m not sure what part of this is more absurd, Jake Tapper making his Jake Tapper face or the “New Year’s Eve” graphic and countdown stuck beneath the coronavirus death count. This is a pandemic, people. This is SERIOUS!)

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Of course, the only reason these two deaths became an issue at all is that Shapiro decided to politicize them by holding a press conference about them last week, blaming them on measles and unvaccinated people while refusing to disclose any information about them.

Now that the truth has come out, he has doubled down.

Believe in science!

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(Last week’s piece on Shapiro’s hypocrisy.)