When the Amish man emerged from his barn to greet me, he had no idea that his newborn son’s death had become national news. The man wore a straw hat, black trousers, and suspenders over a long-sleeved blue shirt; one of his similarly dressed sons was guiding a horse-drawn plow in a nearby field.
The man told me that, like most Amish people, he and his family don’t watch TV or use the internet. They don’t read the newspaper either. So they didn’t know until I told them that last Tuesday, Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, held a press conference to announce the first two “measles-associated” deaths in the state in 35 years. Both of the people who died were from Lancaster County, which is home to the largest Amish community in the country and has been hardest hit by the state’s months-long measles outbreak.
They also didn’t know that Shapiro’s political opponents are accusing him of using the deaths to score political points, or that the county’s coroner later told reporters that his office had performed an autopsy on an infant who tested positive for measles but that the cause of death had been a ruptured spleen. The confusion led Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services, to mock Shapiro on X, calling his press conference “unseemly” and an example of “the weaponization of infectious disease fears for political gain.” Without evidence, Kennedy wrote that “the deaths may even have been altogether fabricated by one of the Governor’s hopeful staffers.”
The Amish man asked me not to reveal his and his family’s names or exactly where they live, to protect the family’s privacy. His son has not been publicly identified as the newborn whose death has been the subject of so much controversy. But the circumstances of the death match, and when I told him about the case that had made the news, he said it sounded like his son. When I ran the family’s biographical details past the Lancaster County coroner, Stephen Diamantoni, he said that the office was not currently investigating any additional infant deaths in the area. When further pressed, Diamantoni said he could neither confirm nor deny the identity of the child whose death his office was investigating.
The story the baby’s father told me filled in many details missing from the accounts of both the coroner and the state. And it made clear that, amid the political squabble and competing theories, an actual family is grieving the death of their child.
I spent part of yesterday afternoon speaking with the newborn’s father and mother, whom I’ll call John and Anna. After John and I had been talking for a while, Anna came out of the house, and—although hesitant at first—agreed to join us. We sat at a table on their porch, which overlooks their postcard-beautiful farm, tucked away down a long gravel driveway. They mostly grow corn on their 45 acres, along with some hay and tobacco. They have a well-tended garden next to the house, and a small chicken coop. They’ve lived on the property for 20 years and have 13 children, some of whom stood nearby on the porch to listen or peered out through one of the screen-covered windows.
About a month ago, John and Anna became aware that measles was spreading in their community. At last count, Lancaster County has recorded 210 cases so far this year. Besides John, no one in the family had been vaccinated against the virus. John told me he’d heard from someone that this strain of measles wasn’t dangerous for pregnant women, but he wasn’t sure whether to believe it. (In fact, measles, regardless of the strain, can cause serious pregnancy complications.) Anna, who was pregnant, worried about the effect measles might have on her baby, but she didn’t think she could avoid being exposed. “I saw we can’t even get away from it because so many people have it,” she told me. Even if Anna had wanted to get vaccinated then, it would have been too late: The CDC recommends against giving the vaccine to pregnant women.
Sure enough, a few weeks ago, one of John and Anna’s older children got sick. The rest of them soon followed. Two of the children became dehydrated and required IVs. Anna became extremely ill, at one point spiking a fever of 102 degrees. She struggled to hold down food and fluids. For days, she could speak only in a whisper. On August 13, she was taken to a clinic to get an IV for dehydration.
The next day, she went into labor. Anna remembers being very weak. “I didn’t have a single piece of energy,” she told me. The baby was delivered at a birthing center by the same midwife who had attended the births of Anna’s other children and, remarkably, Anna’s own birth. The baby, who weighed seven pounds, was born a little after 5 p.m. on August 14. They knew right away that something was wrong: He had a pulse, but he wasn’t breathing. The midwife contacted paramedics, who arrived within minutes. John recalled them giving the newborn oxygen and gentle chest compressions with two thumbs, to no avail. It was all over in less than half an hour. The paramedics told them that the county coroner would need to be contacted to take the body.
As John and Anna spoke with me, one of their sons, who recently turned 1, played with a toy horse and buggy while one of their daughters bounced an orange ball against the table. Anna and John were somber but matter-of-fact about their son’s death. “There’s nothing we can do about it,” Anna told me. John said he viewed the tragedy as part of God’s plan, and pointed out that other parents lose children too. “I guess he chose us this time,” he told me.
Neither John nor Anna has strong feelings about vaccination. Anna told me she wasn’t sure why her parents didn’t get her any shots. Choosing not to immunize their children wasn’t a political statement, and they didn’t make the decision after extensive research. They just didn’t do it.
Pennsylvania allows children to attend school without being vaccinated if their parents object on religious or moral grounds. Though the Amish Church has no official doctrine against vaccines, the vaccination rate among the Amish tends to be low: Last year, the state’s health department estimated that only 25 percent of the Amish community in Lancaster County had received the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine. In 2021, Kennedy declared that the United States needs to “think more like the Amish” at an Amish country fair just a short drive from where John and Anna live. Standing under a big white tent, Kennedy also joked about measles, saying that when he and his siblings caught the disease, they had to “stay at home and watch TV the whole week.” That got a big laugh. He also said the best treatment for measles is vitamin A and chicken soup—a statement that Shapiro has been using to attack Kennedy’s vaccine beliefs since he announced the two measles-associated deaths in his state.
Because they don’t follow the news, John and Anna weren’t aware of the controversy between Shapiro and Kennedy. In fact, they didn’t know who either man was. John said that he had recently received a voicemail from someone saying that a man named Kennedy wanted to speak with him, but he didn’t return the call. (An HHS spokesperson declined to answer questions about that call, instead criticizing Shapiro for prematurely speaking about the measles-associated deaths.) John’s father told them that the local newspaper had published a story about a baby who had died, and that it sounded as though the baby could be theirs, but they weren’t sure. They also didn’t think that their baby’s death was much of a mystery. They assumed that Anna’s severe case of measles contributed to their loss. That’s what the midwife told them as well.
Arguments over whether measles caused the infant’s death have largely centered around the lacerated spleen. It’s a confusing detail. When children acquire measles, the infection can lead to an enlarged spleen, which is more likely to burst. To some people, that might seem like clear evidence that the infant died because of measles. But Diamantoni, the coroner, has publicly maintained that his office believes that the spleen was not enlarged and therefore that the cause of death was not related to measles. (Prominent physicians have since pointed out that a ruptured spleen may not look enlarged even if it was affected by measles.) “I’ve had several discussions with our forensic pathologist, and he feels adamantly that this was not a measles death and that it was a traumatic rupture of his spleen,” Diamantoni told me. He also noted that the investigation was still ongoing and he wasn’t sure when it would be completed.
Diamantoni told me he is “very in favor of immunization,” but questioning whether measles really contributed to measles-associated deaths is becoming more typical among anti-vaccine activists. Last year, two young girls died in West Texas’s massive measles outbreak. Not long after their funerals, anti-vaccine activists reframed their deaths as caused by something other than the measles. Yes, they had the measles, the argument went, but really they died from another infection or hospital error. Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization Kennedy founded before becoming HHS secretary, aggressively pushed that narrative.
What anti-vaccine activists usually neglect to mention is that measles, which can temporarily hamper the immune system’s memory, sets the stage for other infections. Most young children who die from measles are actually killed by pneumonia after their immune system has been overwhelmed. But they almost certainly wouldn’t have died if not for measles.
What exactly happened to John and Anna’s son remains unclear. A ruptured spleen is extremely rare in newborns in any circumstance, and so far the coroner hasn’t determined what could have caused it. John and Anna told me they had no idea either. In fact, they hadn’t heard anything about a ruptured spleen until I mentioned the coroner’s public comments to them; they simply knew that Anna had been sick, and then they had lost their child. John told me he had called the coroner’s office on Friday but was told that the investigation was still under way. They were surprised that details of their baby’s case were being discussed—if indeed the case that has captured national attention is their son’s—while they were still waiting to hear from the coroner and eager to read his report once the investigation had concluded. When I asked Diamantoni why he hadn’t been in touch with John and Anna, he said, speaking generally, that “there may be lots of factors that go into when a notification is made,” but didn’t elaborate further.
John and Anna’s son’s body was returned to them on August 17. He is buried in a cemetery a few miles away from their home. A small mound of fresh dirt sits in the cemetery’s center, marked on either end with flat wooden stakes. Scrawled on one of the stakes is the word sillborn—the t is missing—along with his father’s name. As in other Amish cemeteries in Lancaster County, a white fence surrounds the neatly kept graves, and the headstones are unadorned. It’s everything the public narrative over the boy’s death hasn’t been: simple, modest, and solemn.
Leave a Reply