As Questions Pile Up, Democrat Governor Won’t Clarify Whether Patients Died From Measles Or ‘With Measles’

Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro announced Tuesday the tragic deaths of two individuals with measles in Lancaster County, which is home to a large Amish population.

Media outlets around the country decried the deaths, the first attributable to the disease in the state in 35 years, and faulted Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a driving cause. But within a few hours, Lancaster officials began asking questions that complicated the media’s story.

Lancaster County Coroner Stephen Diamantoni said in an interview with a local reporter that his office had not handled any measles deaths, though it was investigating the death of an infant with a ruptured spleen who tested positive for measles. Furthermore, Republican Lancaster Country Commissioner Joshua Parsons began asking questions about the term of art used by public health officials to describe those deaths: “measles-associated.”

“I started asking questions. I called the coroner’s office. By law, with communicable diseases like measles, the coroner’s office must be alerted. I was shocked to hear from them that they have zero cases,” Parsons told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Kennedy said at a press conference on Wednesday that federal health officials had sought more information about the apparent discrepancy from Pennsylvania but had been met with stonewalling from Shapiro.

“CDC tried to get that information from the governor yesterday and the state is refusing to cooperate,” Kennedy said. “We are doing a better job than any country in the world controlling the measles outbreak. This is a worldwide epidemic.”

Now, the Pennsylvania Department of Health has conceded that there is uncertainty about whether or not the two individuals died from measles, or with measles — uncertainty not reflected in Shapiro’s public comments.