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Five years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. traveled to Amish country, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to address a large anti-vaccination crowd. It was 2021 and the COVID pandemic was still raging; the anti-vaxxer spoke to a crowd of 1,500 people, mocked vaccinations in general, and told them that the cure for measles was chicken soup and vitamin A.

Already primed by their religious beliefs to be suspicious of vaccinations, Kennedy’s Amish and Mennonite audience, known as part of Pennsylvania’s Plain People community, was a ripe target for his anti-vaccine message. In the years since, the number of unvaccinated residents has soared, and so too has the incidence of measles. Kennedy is now secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in which capacity he has continued to undermine confidence in vaccines, including the MMR vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella, and has presided over a resurgence of diseases that, for decades, had been successfully corralled. In the first eight months of 2026, Lancaster County alone reported more than 200 measles cases. Meanwhile, a CDC report released last week documented over 3,000 confirmed measles cases nationally in 2026, the first time the U.S. has exceeded that threshold since 1991.

Dr. Holmes Morton, a pediatric specialist in genetic disorders who has worked with the Plain People for four decades and won a MacArthur Foundation genius fellowship for this work in 2006, is furious at what he is seeing. Morton’s mother and several of her siblings caught measles as teenagers in the late 1930s, and all subsequently became deaf, needing multiple surgeries to try to restore their hearing.

Five years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. traveled to Amish country, mocked vaccinations, and told them that the cure for measles was chicken soup and vitamin A.

Five years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. traveled to Amish country, mocked vaccinations, and told them that the cure for measles was chicken soup and vitamin A.

That personal story has likely impacted Morton’s life choices: Over the past half century, he has made it his mission to convince vaccine skeptics, especially those with genetic disorders common among the Amish — diseases such as pyruvate kinase deficiency that predispose them to particularly serious reactions to an array of infections — of the benefits of vaccines. He also set up the Clinic for Special Children in Lancaster County, in 1989, and, more recently, the Central Pennsylvania Clinic in nearby Mifflin County, which provides medical care for people with special needs caused by genetic disorders. Now, he........

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