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. Last year, he lied about it under oath.
Since Trump took office in 2025, the U.S. has recorded more confirmed measles cases than in the previous 20 years combined.
Pennsylvania health officials announced on Tuesday that a fourth person in the state had died from measles, making 2026 the deadliest year for measles in the United States since the virus was declared eliminated in 2000.
The Mifflin County coroner’s office said an 18-year-old died from a rare neurological complication of measles. The person was not vaccinated, according to the state health department.
A coroner from another Pennsylvania county announced this week that a 40-year-old unvaccinated woman had died from measles complications. On Tuesday, that coroner, Greg Furlong, said that testing had confirmed the woman had contracted measles. Last month, state health officials reported the deaths of two infants who had measles.
Pennsylvania is facing a rapidly expanding measles outbreak that has sickened nearly 700 people and hospitalized more than 130 people. But there are likely to be many more measles cases that have not been reported, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. There are roughly one to three deaths for every 1,000 cases of measles, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suggesting that the true case count in Pennsylvania is higher.
Measles deaths have been very rare in the United States since the disease was declared eliminated from the country in 2000. But as measles has come roaring back, more deaths have occurred. In 2025, two children and an unvaccinated adult died of measles, the first such deaths in a decade.
Remember the tragic measles epidemic and recent deaths in Pennsylvania are still modest relative to what could be in store for us in February March April 2027. In the pre-vaccine era measles reliably peaked in late winter and early spring. And sure enough as antivaccine activism… pic.twitter.com/4zRVwJop6e
— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD DSc(hon) (@PeterHotez) September 13, 2026
