Shapiro Asked Trump to Fire RFK Jr. Over Measles

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said President Donald Trump should remove Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as measles deaths piled up in his state. In a Sept. 18 interview with Allan Smith, Shapiro said he did not trust Kennedy with CDC measles data and could not see why Trump still let him serve.

By Oct. 9, Kennedy still ran HHS. Pennsylvania had 1,136 confirmed measles cases, and the CDC still listed two U.S. measles deaths while the state counted five.

Shapiro Asked Trump Why Kennedy Still Has the Job

Shapiro would not walk back his outbreak response. Asked if he would have handled the first deaths differently, he said no. He said he had wanted one thing from Kennedy on the phone: a public push for measles shots. He said Kennedy instead spent Sept. 17 addressing what Shapiro called the premier vaccine-denial group in America.

I’m actually shocked that the President is letting him get away with this. The President knows better. He knows. I don’t know why he’s still allowing him to even serve in this role.

Josh Shapiro, Governor of Pennsylvania, in an interview with Allan Smith

He went further. Measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, he said, and he drew a straight line from Kennedy’s conduct over many years to the disease’s return. He said Kennedy was reaching into the CDC, polluting it, and turning a death count into politics.

Around that interview, the Pennsylvania Department of Health had 731 confirmed cases in 38 counties and four measles-associated deaths. Shapiro used the word incompetence after Trump called him a bad governor, close to incompetent. Incompetence, Shapiro wrote, was letting a disease declared gone in 2000 come back, and denying four deaths in Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania’s Case Count Kept Climbing After the Interview

The outbreak started in Lancaster County in April. It did not stall while the two men fought on television and on X. The CDC, updating its page on Oct. 9, reported 4,080 confirmed measles cases this year as of noon on Oct. 8, the most in the United States since 1991. That already tops the 2,289 cases logged in all of 2025.

Of those 4,080 cases, 4,062 came from 47 jurisdictions and 18 from international visitors. The agency counted 42 outbreaks. It said 96% of confirmed cases were outbreak-associated. Only 18 cases were tied to international travel. Nationally, 17% of patients were under 5, 42% were 19 or younger, and 10% were hospitalized. About 95% were unvaccinated or had unknown shots.

Pennsylvania alone held more than a quarter of the U.S. total. The Pennsylvania health department measles dashboard showed 1,136 confirmed cases as of Oct. 9, with 157 of them in the prior seven days. Lancaster County had 415. Mifflin County had 167. Ninety-nine percent of Pennsylvania patients were unvaccinated. The state’s hospital rate was 19%, nearly double the national share.

WHERE THE COUNTS STOOD IN EARLY OCTOBER

Sixty-seven percent of Pennsylvania cases have been in adults, which runs against the national age mix. A child at a private Christian school in Allegheny County became the county’s second case; that school’s vaccination rate is 81%, under the 95% level used to stop community spread. From the week of Shapiro’s interview to Oct. 9, the state added 405 confirmed cases.

How Five Deaths Became Two on the CDC Site

Pennsylvania had not recorded a measles death in 35 years before this outbreak. The state health department uses a measles-associated standard: lab or clinical evidence of measles, a death within 30 days of symptoms, and a finding that the death was not from some unrelated event such as a crash. The CDC has been waiting on National Center for Health Statistics records that list measles as the underlying cause, and it is working with state epidemiologists on a single national death definition.

THE FIVE PENNSYLVANIA DEATHS THE STATE HAS LOGGED

• Two Lancaster infants: The department reported the first two measles-associated deaths on Aug. 25, both unvaccinated residents of Lancaster County, where the outbreak began.
• Jefferson County woman: Local officials described a 40-year-old who died of respiratory failure after measles, with COPD and asthma already in her history.
• Mifflin County teen: An unvaccinated 18-year-old died of a rare neurologic complication of measles, according to the county coroner.
• Fifth Lancaster death: On Sept. 30 the department reported a fifth measles-associated death in Lancaster County, again in an unvaccinated resident, with no further public detail.

Those other illnesses are the opening Kennedy’s allies keep using. A ruptured spleen in a newborn, microcephaly in a 6-week-old, COPD in an adult: each one lets a critic say the person died with measles, not of it. Measles still kills 1 to 3 people per 1,000 infections, and five deaths beside roughly 1,000 Pennsylvania cases sits inside that range. It does not settle which office should print which number.

Kennedy said Shapiro’s claim that he ordered the CDC to hide Pennsylvania deaths was false. He said the CDC would post measles-caused deaths when NCHS saw measles as the underlying cause on records the states submit. HHS spokeswoman Emily Hilliard later called any aid conditioned on the death count political blackmail. CDC Director Erica Schwartz, speaking separately, called the MMR shot absolutely safe and absolutely effective, and blamed falling herd immunity for the resurgence.

As of the Oct. 9 CDC update, the federal page still listed two measles deaths for 2026, with a note that the figure could change. Pennsylvania’s fifth death still off the federal tally is the same split in a later form. Families are burying people either way.

Kennedy Told Skeptics They Have a Friend in the White House

The day before Shapiro’s interview, Kennedy gave the keynote at Children’s Health Defense, the group he led from 2015 to 2023. “Let me be clear. You have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House,” he told the room. He said he would die with his boots on chasing vaccine-risk questions.

He mentioned measles once. He said the country cares about every child who dies from measles, and that those deaths get headlines, then asked whether vaccine injuries should get the same care. Mark Gorton of the MAHA Institute spoke before him and called the success of the polio vaccine a fraud. Andrew Wakefield spoke after him. Wakefield’s retracted paper had claimed a link between the MMR shot and autism. That claim has not held up.

Shapiro called the speech unhinged. He said Kennedy was working against American public health and making it harder for governors to keep people safe. On the same day, Shapiro said a phone call with Kennedy had been a lecture about “natural measles,” with blame pointed at Joe Biden, from someone Shapiro said was not grounded in reality.

Kennedy still says the MMR shot is the most effective way to prevent measles. That sentence sits beside a conference that treated vaccine injury as the headline and measles deaths as media bias. Shapiro’s firing ask was aimed at that split, not at a missing press release.

Today, the Pennsylvania Department of Health confirmed two more measles-associated deaths after local coroners reported these individuals died from complications associated with measles. That's four total measles-associated deaths in our Commonwealth and the first Pennsylvania…

— Governor Josh Shapiro (@GovernorShapiro) September 15, 2026

Shapiro Tied CDC Help to the Death Count

Kennedy’s counter is not only about death certificates. He says Shapiro refused the same CDC Epi-Aid other states used, and that the governor maligned the Amish while the virus moved through counties with low shot rates. He named Texas, South Carolina, Virginia, Kansas, New Mexico, and Wisconsin as states that took CDC teams and brought outbreaks down. Shapiro had told Kennedy in late August that Pennsylvania did not want extra federal officials until the four deaths were acknowledged.

FROM THE FIRST DEATHS TO THE AID FIGHT

1. April 2026: Measles outbreak begins in Lancaster County.
2. August 25, 2026: Pennsylvania reports two measles-associated deaths, both unvaccinated Lancaster residents, the first in the state in 35 years.
3. September 15, 2026: The state confirms two more unvaccinated deaths, in Jefferson and Mifflin counties, bringing the total to four, and Shapiro accuses Kennedy of blocking CDC posting.
4. September 17, 2026: Health Secretary Debra Bogen writes CDC Director Schwartz to start an Epi-Aid request that would be pulled if the four deaths stay off the federal count; Kennedy keynotes Children’s Health Defense.
5. September 18, 2026: Shapiro says he does not know why Trump still lets Kennedy serve.
6. September 30, 2026: Pennsylvania reports a fifth measles-associated death and 943 cases in 39 counties, with 176 hospitalizations.
7. Early October 2026: Pennsylvania accepts CDC aid even though the agency still lists two of the five deaths; New York, with about 100 cases, declares a health emergency and prepares its own CDC ask.

Bogen’s letter made the CDC field help to four counted deaths an explicit trade. That is a real delay. Other states took the epidemiologists first and argued later. Pennsylvania’s caseload kept rising while the condition sat on the table, then the state took the help anyway without winning the full dashboard. New York moved faster on an emergency declaration with a much smaller outbreak. Shapiro still has not issued one.

Governor Shapiro has chosen to politicize this outbreak instead of implementing a unified public health response. He continues to point the finger at me and the federal government and to malign the Amish while refusing the federal assistance that might help end the outbreak.

I… https://t.co/z589J4Shfr

— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) September 15, 2026

The department did keep vaccinating while the fight ran. State health-center staff gave more than 5,500 MMR doses at 180 pop-up clinics after late April, and department nurses gave more than 8,500 doses in 2026. Pennsylvania providers usually give about 25,000 MMR doses in a month. They gave more than 49,000 in August and more than 56,000 in September.

U.S. Kindergarten MMR Coverage Is Below 95%

Two MMR doses still offer 97% lifetime protection against measles, the figure Pennsylvania prints on its outbreak notices. The country is no longer near the coverage that made that number enough.

THE SHOT RATES UNDER THIS OUTBREAK

• Herd line: About 95% MMR coverage is the level used to stop community measles spread.
• Kindergarten MMR: Coverage was 92.4% for the 2025-26 school year, down from 95% in 2019-20, according to KFF.
• Exemptions: 4.2% of kindergarteners had an exemption from one or more school shots, up from 2.5% in 2019-20.
• States under the line: 39 states were below 95% MMR coverage, and 18 were below 90%.

Kennedy has spent 19 months changing the federal shot schedule around that slide. In June 2025 he fired the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. In January 2026, HHS cut routine childhood shots from 13 to 7 and the number of diseases targeted from 17 to 11. A federal judge has blocked that schedule for now. In August, a White House order again backed the shorter list and told HHS to offer measles, mumps, and rubella as three shots instead of one combined MMR dose. Trump has also said the MMR shot could be “quite lethal,” a claim that does not match decades of safety data.

KFF polling found 47% of people trust the CDC at least a fair amount for vaccine information. About 38% of voters approve of the Trump administration’s vaccine policy, and 61% disapprove. Thirty states and Washington, D.C., have said they will not follow CDC shot advice on at least one childhood vaccine; 27 have split off for all of them. Fewer than 1% of Pennsylvania’s measles cases have been in vaccinated people. Four vaccinated patients were on the books when the state had 943 cases.

Trump Left His Health Secretary in Place

Trump answered Shapiro’s personnel demand by insulting Shapiro, not by replacing Kennedy. The Oval Office line was that Pennsylvania has a bad governor, close to incompetent. Kennedy kept the HHS building. On Oct. 8, Shapiro was still naming Kennedy on the campaign trail, saying measles came back in part because of vaccine claims from the secretary, and that Shapiro’s opponent had stood beside Kennedy in Harrisburg.

Replies to that post treated the outbreak as Shapiro’s own failure and the deaths as a stacked count. That argument has a handle because some of the dead were already very sick, and because the governor slow-walked federal epidemiologists. It does not rewind 1,136 infections, a 19% hospital rate, or a disease the United States had declared gone in 2000.

Kennedy still holds the job Shapiro said Trump should end. Pennsylvania’s dashboard still lists five measles-associated deaths. The CDC page, as of Oct. 9, still lists two.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on a measles outbreak and a public fight over federal health leadership. It is for information only and is not medical advice, a diagnosis, or a recommendation about whether any person should receive the MMR vaccine or any other shot. Readers with questions about measles exposure, symptoms, pregnancy, or immunization should speak with a licensed physician, pediatrician, or local health department before making a health decision. Case counts, death classifications, and agency policies are those published by the Pennsylvania Department of Health, the CDC, and KFF as of the dates cited and can change as investigations close.