In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio. A top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.
Since President Trump took office in 2025, the U.S. has recorded more confirmed measles cases than in the previous 20 years combined.
This time, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and the Lancaster County coroner agree: An infant died of measles in the state, the first confirmed death in 35 years.
Shapiro cited the coroner’s confirmation Friday on X and took another jab at Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who said last week the Democrat’s staff might have fabricated the death to make Kennedy look bad.“Instead of listening to the real doctors and public health experts, RFK chose to sow doubt, play politics, direct the CDC not to acknowledge these deaths, and even accuse me of fabricating these tragedies,” Shapiro posted on the social media platform.
The county coroner, Stephen Diamantoni, has previously said he disagreed with Shapiro about the cause of death of another newborn, an Amish boy who died soon after birth last month. Diamantoni said the baby, who had measles, died of a ruptured spleen and that he did not believe measles contributed.
Shapiro and his health department said last week that two Pennsylvanians had died of “measles-associated” causes.
Diamantoni said earlier Friday a 6-week-old girl from the county’s Amish community died of measles at home last month. The baby had microcephaly, a condition that usually leads to death by six months of age, but measles was the cause of death, Diamantoni said, according to local media reports.
When contacted by POLITICO, Pennsylvania’s health department did not directly say the baby is the second measles-associated death it reported last week, but Press Secretary Neil Ruhland reaffirmed there were two deaths in an email statement. “The Lancaster County Coroner has now publicly confirmed a second infant death involving measles,” Ruhland said.
Shapiro’s X post, referencing the coroner’s office, implied that this case is the second one he referred to last week.
The Amish community has long had low vaccination rates. Neither of the two babies was old enough to receive a measles vaccine, which is typically given at age 1.
David Mandell, the director of the Penn Center for Mental Health and a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania whose research focuses on autism services and policy, told Newsweek that claims that Amish communities do not experience autism are inaccurate.
"It's untrue to say that Amish communities have no autism," Mandell said.
He said measuring autism prevalence in Amish communities can be particularly difficult because diagnoses often depend on parental reporting and access to specialists.
"Autism is behaviorally determined and highly reliant on parent report," Mandell said, adding that prevalence studies can be challenging in communities where families may be less likely to discuss developmental concerns with outsiders.
The Amish are often cited in vaccine debates because some communities have lower immunization rates than the wider U.S. population.
An article published by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that Amish communities generally have lower vaccination uptake, although vaccination practices vary significantly between settlements and families.
Experts caution against treating the Amish as a single, uniform population. Different communities can have different health care practices, levels of engagement with doctors and attitudes toward vaccination.That distinction is important because claims about "the Amish" often imply that all Amish children are unvaccinated, when vaccination practices can differ considerably among communities and households.
Mandell likewise cautioned against treating Amish communities as uniformly unvaccinated.
"Amish people do get vaccinated," he said. "While the vaccination rates are much lower than the surrounding populations, more than half of Amish children do get vaccinated
