How Not to Announce a Measles Death

Dr. Bedard, a contributing Opinion writer, is a geriatrician and a palliative care physician.

The United States has had at least 2,777 confirmed measles cases this year, the most on record this century and more than the country had in all of 2025. On Tuesday, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, announced that there had been two measles-associated deaths in the state — the first such deaths this year. That’s when a new kind of trouble started.

Over the following 48 hours, the public received conflicting information about the deaths from the Pennsylvania Department of Health, the Lancaster County coroner, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health........

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