We Have Our First U.S. Measles Deaths of 2026. How Many More Will Follow?

We have a grim milestone to add to this week’s notable headlines: The U.S. has its first two confirmed deaths from measles of 2026, both of which reportedly happened in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County. Go ahead an add it to the checklist of “places RFK Jr. once visited specifically to trash vaccines in a speech, where unvaccinated people are now dying of communicable, preventable diseases.”

Just five years ago, our current Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, then the leader of his anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense, addressed more than 1,500 people at a Lancaster County farming fair. In that speech, he specifically downplayed the threat of measles, of which there had been only about 50 cases nationwide, the disease having been considered eliminated from natural/steady spread in the U.S. for more than 20 years. He fearmongered that the federal government would be aggressively foisting vaccines on people, including the local Amish community, saying that “Those agencies are going to do everything in their power to make the Amish vaccinate, because they cannot stand the fact that you are healthy.” He reminisced on having measles himself as a child with fond nostalgia, saying he “had to stay home and watch TV the whole week,” to reported cheers and applause from the crowd. Kennedy then declared the following: “The cure for measles is chicken soup and vitamin A.”

A few years later, RFK Jr. is now somehow in charge of the country’s most critical agencies fighting the spread of communicable disease, and measles cases in the U.S. are at their highest point in 35 years, with 2026’s numbers (2,777 cases) having eclipsed 2025’s soaring totals with a quarter of the year still to go. The people in Pennsylvania he told not to worry about measles? As of this week, 393 of them have caught the disease, with another 86 diagnosed in the past week, and at least 70 hospitalized. Almost no details are known about the two who died, meanwhile, as (embarrassed) state health officials say they won’t be releasing any additional details on them. What we can say is that the numbers here are almost guaranteed to be significantly lower than the true number of measles infections in Pennsylvania’s ongoing outbreak, because of traditional communities such as the Amish or Mennonites not seeking treatment or reporting illnesses. There may have even been more deaths already that haven’t been reported. And certainly, it’s not wrong to expect more deaths to come.

Before last year, there were no US measles deaths in a decade, and now we have had 5 deaths in two years.

Measles was declared eliminated in the US in 2000, but will lose that status this year.

This is an abject failure of public health leadership.

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— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran.com) 10:54 AM · Aug 25, 2026

That both the deaths were people who were unvaccinated for measles is no surprise, because the continuing U.S. outbreaks of the disease have been almost entirely in these communities, with only a small handful of “breakthrough” cases of fully vaccinated people, which also tend to be much more mild. According to the CDC’s weekly updated data, 97% of all the measles cases logged in the U.S. in 2026 have been in people who have had less than the two necessary doses of the MMR vaccine. Nearly 70% have been in children, raising the distinct possibility that these two deaths in Lancaster County were also kids; something that Pennsylvania health officials are now attempting to sweep under the rug because they know it would result in heightened criticism. In 2025, the country recorded three deaths specifically from measles, two of whom were children in Texas. As Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center and a doctor at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia observed: “These deaths are entirely preventable.”

Preventing them, however, will require a generational reset on preventative vaccines, which the Trump administration is still attacking now even as measles cases boom, rather than encouraging or convincing Americans to protect themselves. The national rate of vaccine exemptions among kindergarteners has continued to climb, now sitting at 4.2%, which is up from 3.6% last year, according to the CDC. This is seen even more dramatically in a specific community like Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where the rate of MMR vaccination in children was 95.5% as recently as 2017, but is now all the way down to 87.6%, considered well below the level needed for herd immunity.

Here is RFK Jr telling a crowd in Lancaster, PA that the cure for measles is “chicken soup”

(2 people in Lancaster, PA just died from measles)

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— FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social) 11:44 AM · Aug 25, 2026

Why ever would those rates of measles vaccine protection continue to fall? Oh I don’t know, could it be in some way connected to the Secretary of HHS constantly suggesting that maybe those vaccines aren’t safe? Or the President of the United States recently suggesting that getting the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine–which has been given for more than 60 years–could be “quite lethal”? Trump, as a preeminent creator of problems that do not exist, has suggested that the MMR vaccine should be instead split into three separate vaccines (more doctor trips, more shots), and that this will somehow have better health outcomes, despite there being zero data to support this position. Other health officials in the administration, meanwhile, are left saying literally the opposite thing, like Dr. Mehmet Oz, Administrator of the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who was recently backed into a corner and told the host of CBS’ Face the Nation that “the MMR vaccine is not a lethal vaccine.” Sure, that’s absolutely not confusing messaging/the opposite of Trump’s statement at all.

When pressed hard enough, the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can occasionally be strong-armed into offering some kind of lukewarm statement “in support” of vaccination or a specific vaccine like the MMR shot, saying that the government’s official position is that most people should receive it. But good luck getting that sentiment to a place like Lancaster County, which RFK Jr. saw fit to visit in person five years ago specifically to tell people that “The cure for measles is chicken soup and vitamin A.” Now, two people are dead there. It’s not the first time this has happened, and it will surely not be the last. Even as incredible breakthroughs continue to happen in the scientific field of mRNA vaccines in particular, which may before long be used to target cancer and all manner of diseases, we still can’t get our federal government to genuinely endorse the life-saving vaccines we’ve watched be rigorously tested on billions of people for more than half a century.

You don’t have to worry about RFK Jr.’s kids, at least. All of them are fully vaccinated. It’s the people who actually believe in the man who continue to be in danger.