If we take the Pennsylvania Department of Health at face value, two people have now died from measles—the first such deaths in the state in 35 years.
The Pennsylvania Department of Health (DOH) today confirmed two measles-associated deaths in Pennsylvania. Both individuals were unvaccinated. These mark the first deaths related to measles within the Commonwealth in 35 years.
If we take the Pennsylvania DOH at face value, there are now two more arguments as to why vaccines are supposed to be a good thing.
The key phrase here is, of course, “if we take the Pennsylvania DOH at face value.”
If.
If we ask questions, probe for information, look for data, we get two more arguments why we should not take the Pennsylvania DOH at face value.
Most media outlets, of course, are either taking the DOH at face value or are willingly colluding with the agency to push out yet another instance of public health hogwash and horse hockey. Thus we get two more arguments why most media outlets—especially corporate media outlets—should never be trusted to report anything accurately.
Are we surprised by this? We shouldn’t be. After the COVID Pandemic Panic, we know for a certainty that the media can and will blatantly lie to push medical hysteria and promote pharmaceutical authoritarianism.
The Pennsylvania measles “deaths” are no exception.
As is typical of propaganda, if you look at the words closely, you can spot the lies straight away.
When NBC news reported on the story, the reporting morphed from “measles-associated” deaths as announced by the DOH to simply “died of measles”.
The department announced Tuesday that two unvaccinated residents had died of measles, the first measles-related deaths in the U.S. this year and the first in Pennsylvania in 35 years.
On Wednesday, the department said one of those deaths was under investigation by the Lancaster County Coroner’s Office, which had said it was reviewing the death of an infant with a positive measles test.
It is a subtle shift, but an important one. “Measles-associated” merely means the death and the measles disease involve the same patient. The word “associated” means nothing more than “related, connected, or combined together”, according to Merriam-Webster. A person who is going to the doctor because they’ve contracted measles and is the victim of an horrific and fatal car crash is a “measles-associated” death: they had measles and they died. Yet the measles is demonstrably not the cause of death in such an instance.
“Measles-associated” does not mean “died of measles”, and corporate media knows full well that it is lying when it conflates its reporting that way.
The Washington Post weighed in by publishing a fascinating graphic depicting how massively contagious measles is.
(Side note: note how relatively non-contagious the SARS-CoV-2 virus now is. I’m old enough to remember when SARS-CoV-2 was highly contagious and extremely dangerous, much more dangerous than mere measles—which was, of course, another media lie.)
To be sure, measles absolutely is highly contagious, and has long been understood to be highly contagious. However, what the Washington Post’s graphic is skewing ever so subtly is what is known as the “R0” value for the pathogen, which is the base estimate for how many people a single patient can infect. The R0 for measles is estimated at being between 12 and 18, meaning one measles patient can potentially infect up to 12 to 18 other people1.
The Washington Post is perhaps technically not lying, but by reporting the upper bound without also reporting the lower bound of the R0 range, they are giving that upper bound undue emphasis. That is still deception. That is still dishonest. That is still propaganda.
Even alternative media outlet Breitbart leaned into the “measles death” narrative, focusing its report on Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Debra Bogen’s canned quote from the DOH news release.
Dr. Debra Bogen, the state’s secretary of health, said in a statement said that the deaths emphasize the severity of the illness due to it being largely absent from public life for 35 years.
“My deepest sympathies are with the loved ones who are facing this unimaginable loss,” said Bogen. “Because measles was largely eliminated in the Commonwealth for more than three decades, people are not familiar with this disease and don’t fully understand the potential severity of the illness.”
“We want to ensure every Pennsylvanian has the information they need to protect themselves, their loved ones and their communities,” Bogen’s statement continued. “As a physician, I want to make sure that people understand that the MMR vaccine is safe and provides the best protection we have against measles.”
Any death is a tragedy for the person who dies and for their loved ones. That’s the nature of death. Yet the tragic nature of death does not mean that we should not verify claims made about a death, at the very least to confirm factual accuracy.
As the Gateway Pundit reported, that’s where the “measles deaths” narrative runs into problems.
During a high-profile press conference on Tuesay, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, alongside state health officials and Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health, announced that two “measles-associated deaths” occurred in Lancaster County.
The legacy media immediately ran with the headlines. Two people died FROM measles. Case closed. Get the shot. Blame the unvaccinated. Blame RFK Jr.
There’s just one major problem: Local authorities have ZERO record of these alleged deaths.
Even worse, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro tried to pin the deaths on HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., blaming him for Pennsylvanians not getting their measles vaccines.
How odd, then, when RFK, Jr., called Josh Shapiro out, claiming that state and local officials would not share with the CDC or anyone else from HHS the clinical data about the two alleged measles deaths.
RFK Jr.: “We are trying to get information about those two casualties. According to a statement that was released by the Lancaster County Commissioner today, they cannot find any measles deaths in Lancaster County, and they complain that the governor will not give them that information.
CDC tried to get that information from the governor yesterday, and the state is refusing to cooperate. We’re doing a better job than any country in the world at controlling the measles outbreak. This is a worldwide epidemic, and it’s happening because of the lockdowns, because many kids did not get vaccinated during the lockdowns.
RFK Jr. also pointed out that, since he became HHS secretary, the drop in vaccination rates has been quite a bit less than during the Biden Reign of Error—and that he’s never opposed the measles vaccine itself.
So, even in my discussion with Governor Shapiro yesterday, he said to me, “Well, we’ve seen this big drop in vaccination rates in the state from 97 to 92.3.” He admitted on the phone that it all happened during the Biden administration.
Since I’ve been in office, since President Trump’s been in office, there’s been a one-tenth of 1% diminishment. We are actually restoring faith in the public health agencies so people will take our advice. And our advice is that people should get the measles vaccination.
Straight away, we are left with either RFK Jr. lying about the CDC response to the measles deaths in Pennsylvania, or Josh Shapiro is lying.
Local reporting, as summarized by The Gateway Pundit, appears to tilt the scales of evidence towards RFK Jr. and away from Josh Shapiro (and, by extension, away from the Pennsylvania DOH).
Lancaster County Commissioner Josh Parsons, a former prosecutor, went to the people who actually handle death investigations.
Any death from a communicable disease is required by law to be reported to the Lancaster County Coroner’s Office. Parsons spoke at length with senior staff and with Coroner Dr. Stephen Diamantoni. Their answer: zero measles deaths in Lancaster County. They have one death of a person who died WITH measles, but not FROM measles. They know nothing about a second death.
Local reporting independently confirmed the same gap. Diamantoni said “no measles deaths were handled by our office,” while the office was investigating an infant who tested positive for measles and died of a ruptured spleen. Officials still will not say whether that infant is one of the two cases Shapiro put on national television.
Suffice it to say, a ruptured spleen is not a symptom or consequence of measles infection. An infant who died from a ruptured spleen after testing positive for measles is no more a measles death than the Florida man who died in a motorcycle accident was a COVID death because he tested positive for COVID.
Local media outlets in Lancaster County confirm The Gateway Pundit’s reporting.
Lancaster County’s coroner, Dr. Stephen Diamantoni, said Tuesday that “no measles deaths were handled by our office,” though the office was investigating the death of an infant who tested positive for measles and died because of a ruptured spleen. The investigation is ongoing, he said.
He also pointed out that there could be several reasons for the difference between the state’s and the coroner office’s numbers. First, the coroner may not yet have received information about the “measles-associated” deaths. Second, it could be that patients who were severely sick may have been treated at a specialized facility outside of the county. A death in such a case would be handled by that county’s coroner.
While it is technically possible that a Lancaster resident ended up being treated at a facility outside Lancaster County, Lancaster County is not lacking for healthcare facilities, which makes it unlikely that there would be a need to incur the expense and burden of transporting a patient outside the county.
Which means the media is once again presenting major misinformation—i.e., lying—about a medical news item.
There are people who have contracted measles in Lancaster County. Measles vaccination rates have declined in Lancaster County. People have also died in Lancaster County. These are documented and indisputable facts.
Yet these facts do not amount to a single case of someone dying as a result of contracting measles. The information which can be independently confirmed does not support the media reporting of two people dying as a result of contracting measles.
Just as was true with COVID, just as was true with the monkeypox scare, all of the information needed to do honest journalism about the Pennsylvania measles cases is out there. Anyone interested in actual journalism could easily access this information and give a complete, factual assessment of measles and mortality in Lancaster County PA.
One thing has clearly not changed from the COVID Pandemic Panic era: where media news stories are concerned, the rule of thumb must always be “Trust nothing. Verify everything.”
We must always remember that every media outlet had the same opportunity to accurately present the facts about the Lancaster County measles cases.
Corporate media did not do that. Even some alternative media outlets did not do that. Rather than check facts first, the majority of media outlets simply jumped on the “measles deaths” narrative bandwagon.
Rather than report honestly and accurately, the majority of media outlets chose to push a false narrative and lie to you—again.
Guerra, Fiona M et al. “The basic reproduction number (R0) of measles: a systematic review.” The Lancet. Infectious diseases vol. 17,12 (2017): e420-e428. doi:10.1016/S1473-3099(17)30307-9
I had measles when I was five. It was nothing. My only memory of it was looking in the mirror and being startled by the weird dots on my face that hadn’t been there before. The young generations today are being raised in a culture of continuous fear, and that will not serve our country well.
I love the oozing critical thinking skills presented in your article. People don’t seem to ask questions anymore. Who? What? Where? When. How? The fact that no evidence has been reported to the authorities is very telling. 🙂