Kennedy Stirred Vaccine Fears in Pennsylvania Years Before Measles Outbreak (Teddy Rosenbluth, NY Times, August 12, 2026)

From The New York Times:

Kennedy Stirred Vaccine Fears in Pennsylvania Years Before Measles Outbreak

At a speech in Lancaster County, Robert F. Kennedy mocked the threat of measles. Now local officials are racing to contain one of the largest outbreaks in the country.

Before becoming health secretary, Mr. Kennedy promoted vaccine skepticism as the leader of Children’s Health Defense. Credit...Desiree Rios for The New York Times

By Teddy Rosenbluth

Teddy Rosenbluth spoke to local leaders, doctors and members of the plain community in Lancaster County, Pa., as well as those involved in vaccination efforts in the area.

Aug. 12, 2026
Pressed recently on whether he might accept responsibility for the resurgence of measles in the country, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fended off any suggestion that his history of promoting vaccine skepticism might be partly to blame.The groups facing these outbreaks were “almost all religious communities that just don’t vaccinate,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash.“It’s hard to blame that on me,” he added.But what Mr. Kennedy failed to acknowledge is his own role, and the role of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group he once led, in stirring distrust in those very communities. That includes in Lancaster County, Pa., which is now at the center of one of the largest measles outbreaks in the country.The state has reported dozens of hospitalizations and more than 230 cases, a number some local doctors consider to be a vast underestimate given that local Mennonite and Amish communities tend to avoid traditional health care.

Five years ago, Mr. Kennedy stood behind a wooden lectern on a farm in the county and delivered a warning to the local Amish community about the nation’s public health agencies.

“Those agencies are going to do everything in their power to make the Amish vaccinate,” he said. “Because they cannot stand the fact that you are healthy.”

A large crowd — 1,500 people according to a local paper’s account— spilled out from under a white tent at the annual farming fair to hear from Mr. Kennedy, then the leader of Children’s Health Defense. He turned to measles, a disease that was so horrible, he joked, that when he fell ill with it as a child he “had to stay home and watch TV the whole week.” The audience erupted with applause and laughter.

“The cure for measles is chicken soup and vitamin A,” he added.

Local leaders acknowledged that improving childhood vaccination rates has long been a challenge within the area’s Amish communities, where just a quarter of people have been vaccinated against measles, according to a 2025 estimate.

But they also said the work of anti-vaccine groups, including Mr. Kennedy’s visit with Children’s Health Defense, hadn’t made it any easier.

All it takes is somebody like that, an anti-vaxxer, to make a personal appearance to a group who already has second thoughts about immunizations,” said Dr. Alan Peterson, a family medicine physician in the county and former medical director of a program that provided free vaccines to children in Lancaster County. “Some of them just say, ‘OK, that’s all I need to know and we’re not going to get our immunizations.’”

Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said that under Mr. Kennedy’s leadership, the agency has mounted an aggressive measles outbreak response which has included investing more than $8.5 million to support affected communities and deploying experts to offer assistance.

She added that the department works “to ensure that all communities — including those who choose not to vaccinate — have access to appropriate medical care, including therapeutics.” Children’s Health Defense did not respond to a request for comment.

To those on the front lines of the Pennsylvania outbreak, Mr. Kennedy’s assessment of the current measles situation was off-base on several counts.

For one, area doctors pointed out that the virus wasn’t only spreading through insular religious groups, as he suggested on CNN, but also those in the broader community. The percentage of children vaccinated against measles has declined in the county — falling to 88 percent of kindergartners in 2025, down from 94 percent in 2019 — as it has in the United States overall.

Image

Credit...Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press

Several local leaders who work with or are part of the area’s so-called plain communities — a group that includes Amish and Mennonite people, who often refrain from using consumer technology, dress modestly and adopt other lifestyle restrictions — also pushed back against the characterization that they simply refuse vaccines.

There are a variety of attitudes toward vaccines within these communities, though it’s true that vaccination rates tend to be lower. That is because of cultural skepticism toward secular authorities and because children often do not attend public schools, which require vaccinations, said Cory Anderson, who studies those groups at Penn State University.

But historically, the groups were more willing to accept vaccines when there were strong relationships with local doctors, community outreach and acceptance of the shots by local Amish leaders, said Dr. Jeffrey Martin, a physician at Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health.

“The Amish are not a group that simply doesn’t vaccinate,” he added.

Allen Hoover, an Old Order Mennonite, spent nearly two decades leading vaccination efforts as the administrator at Parochial Medical Center, a clinic that mainly serves the county’s plain community. Changing attitudes was a slow process that required gentle encouragement and frequent one-on-one conversations about the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, which is highly effective at preventing infection and has an excellent safety record.

Gradually, as families saw children spared from the worst diseases, vaccination rates began to climb, he said. (The Pennsylvania Department of Health does not routinely collect vaccination data broken out by religion.)

“We had gained so much trust,” Mr. Hoover said.

Then the pandemic hit, bringing mask mandates, business closures and restrictions on church gatherings.

“It just really eroded the public trust, particularly in those communities, and really gave a stronger voice to those that were advocating for alternatives to the vaccination,” said Alice Yoder, the executive director of community health at Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health during that time.

Dr. Ken Brown, a retired scientist living in Lancaster County, remembered taking out an ad in 2021 to encourage vaccination in The Pennsylvania Busy Beaver, a publication that goes out to tens of thousands of Amish and Mennonite people in the region. Two trusted figures in the community had received their Covid-19 vaccines, he wrote, and “neither had a problem!”

The next month, Pennsylvania Coalition for Informed Consent — a partner organization of Children’s Health Defense’s Pennsylvania chapter — took out an almost identical advertisement captioned: “Vaccines can have unintended consequences.”