PA Gov. Shapiro Fires Back at RFK Jr’s Vaccine ‘Thoroughly Discredited’ Claims Amid Measles Outbreak in His State

L: AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein; R: AP Photo/Marc Levy

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) fired back at claims made by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about vaccines amid a measles outbreak in his state.

On Tuesday, the news broke that two people in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania had died from the measles. Both were unvaccinated, according to the state’s Department of Health. No one in the Keystone State had died from the measles in 35 years.

President Donald Trump’s decision to nominate Kennedy to head the country’s health services alarmed many doctors and scientists, due to his lack of education in medical or scientific topics and history of spreading false conspiracy theories about vaccines.

Since winning Senate confirmation and taking over at HHS, Kennedy has continued to express doubts in vaccines long shown to be safe and effective, vaccination rates have dropped, and the U.S. is experiencing the worst measles outbreak since the early 1990s.

On Tuesday, Kennedy wrote a lengthy social media post criticizing Shapiro for comments the governor made at a press conference about Pennsylvania’s measles cases.

In the post, Kennedy complained that Shapiro had “accused [him] of promoting conspiracy theories” about the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine:

At his press conference today, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro accused me of promoting conspiracy theories because I told him, during an earlier telephone conversation, that some Americans had religious objections to the MMR vaccine because it contained fetal tissue. “There is no fetal tissue in the MMR,” he told me.

This is a segment from a videotaped deposition of Stanley Plotkin, the inventor of the MMR vaccine. Plotkin admits to butchering 76 aborted normally developing fetuses, all over three months old, in just one of the many studies that led to the development of his vaccine.

The rubella virus used in MMR-II is grown on the cultured cell line composed of lung tissue from an aborted three-month-old female embryo and listed as “WI-38 human diploid lung fibroblasts” in the ingredients of MMR-II as portions of these cells end up in each vial of MMR II.

During Dr. Plotkin’s deposition, Attorney Aaron Siri asked: “Isn’t it true that MMR II contains approximately 150 nanograms cells substrate double-strand DNA and single-strand DNA per dose purposefully fragmented to approximately 215 base pairs in length?” Dr. Plotkin answered: “Yeah, that’s probably correct, yes.”

This equals approximately 646 billion pieces of human DNA from an aborted fetal cell line in each vial of MMR-II.

In addition to the human DNA, there is also an unspecified amount of human cellular debris in each dose of MMR-II.

During our phone conversation, Governor Shapiro also accused me of promoting vaccine misinformation. When I asked him for an example, he was unable to provide one, but this did not deter him from publicly repeating that accusation during his press event. As I told him, HHS does not tolerate misinformation by any employee. I offered to point to hundreds of instances of vaccine misinformation by the Biden administration about which I had never heard him complain.

Governor Shapiro also faulted me for the decline in Pennsylvania vaccination rates from 97% – 93.2%. When I pushed back on this assertion, he acknowledged that most of the decline occurred during the Biden administration. It’s unfortunately true that the government lockdowns, deceptions, manipulation, and overreach during Covid severely damaged public faith in the vaccine program.

Governor Shapiro’s press conference was an example of the same species of gaslighting.

The Trump administration is working to restore public trust not by gaslighting or manipulating, but by being truthful, at last, with the public.

Shapiro responded Wednesday with his own lengthy post bashing Kennedy’s as “inaccurate and misleading” and containing “claims that have been debunked repeatedly by actual scientists and doctors,” specifically calling out Kennedy’s claim that the MMR vaccines contain aborted fetal tissue,” which the governor wrote has been “thoroughly discredited time after time by real doctors and trusted medical institutions.”

Shapiro’s full post read:

Let’s set the record straight because @RobertKennedyJr’s post is inaccurate and misleading and he is making claims that have been debunked repeatedly by actual scientists and doctors.

Secretary Kennedy called me yesterday morning to ask whether Pennsylvania needed any additional support to respond to the measles outbreak. I told him I appreciated the call but that our Administration and the Pennsylvania Department of Health had all the resources we needed to respond, including existing support from professional staff at the CDC and HHS.

I told him what would be most helpful is if he would join me in encouraging people to get vaccinated and stop spreading misinformation. He then launched into a tirade — talking about fetal tissue and blaming the previous Administration for this problem. He even told me it would be better if we went back to “natural measles.”

Unfortunately at a time where I needed the top “health expert” in the nation to responsibly work with us to deal with this outbreak, he instead chose to go down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and false claims.

To his claim about fetal tissue, that has been thoroughly discredited time after time by real doctors and trusted medical institutions like CHOP. In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics has an entire webpage devoted to this.

They write: “Vaccines do not contain fetal cells. Some vaccines involve growing viruses in human cell cultures originally developed from two aborted fetuses in the 1960s. These cell lines are still going, so no new aborted fetuses are ever needed. Purification processes filter the vaccine during production, and no fetal tissue remains.”

But my conversation with him proved what many of us already knew:

Secretary Kennedy’s actions to dismantle public health agencies and his language that undermines confidence in vetted medical guidance are contributing to these kinds of outbreaks.

Just a few years ago, Secretary Kennedy was in Lancaster downplaying the severity of measles and saying that the cure was “chicken soup and vitamin A.”

Before he held his current position, measles was virtually eliminated in the United States. As recently as 2024, there were only 285 cases of measles across the entire country over 12 months. This year, in just 8 months, there are nearly 400 cases of measles across 29 counties in Pennsylvania alone — and nearly 3,000 cases across the country.

In Pennsylvania, 70 people who have tested positive for measles have been hospitalized this year — and yesterday, our
@PAHealthDept announced that two Pennsylvanians who tested positive for measles have died.

According to doctors and medical experts, the MMR vaccine is the best way to protect yourself, your kids, and your community against measles. But we have seen vaccination rates decline on RFK’s watch.

The correlation is clear: Secretary Kennedy has stoked confusion amongst parents and others — and the result has been less protection from measles and more cases.

As a dad, all I want is to protect our four kids. I know that’s how every parent feels. Parents have the right to make their own decisions about how to keep their kids safe and sort through the noise to figure out which information to trust.

So what I’d ask of every parent in Pennsylvania: take any information you get about vaccines and talk to a trusted health care provider about it before you make your decision.

The most important conversation that needs to take place now is one that should happen offline, in the real world, between parents, their trusted health care providers, and other medical experts.

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