US health officials exclude measles-related deaths in Pennsylvania from counts

RFK Jr, the health secretary, has suggested the deaths were ‘fabricated’ while the CDC claimed it was reviewing them Top US health officials and government agencies are currently not including the two recent measles-associated deaths in Pennsylvania in their counts. “This is highly unusual,” said Debra Houry, former chief medical officer of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She noted that this did not happen with the three deaths reported from measles in Texas and New Mexico last year. Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), gave the wrong number of measles deaths in a recent interview with Fox News. “In 10 years, there have been three measles deaths in America,” he said, comparing that with deaths from “food-induced illness” – a category the CDC does not appear to track. “The media and certain demagogue politicians are constantly trying to scare us about infectious disease,” Kennedy said, adding that he was attempting to “redirect attention and resource [sic] to the thing that’s really killing Americans, which are foodborne diseases”. There were three deaths associated with measles in the US last year, the