X marks the spat: Shapiro, RFK Jr. needle each other online over measles outbreak

Gov. Josh Shapiro and Pennsylvania health officials today pushed back against claims by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that the vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella, known as MMR, contains fetal tissue along with “human cellular debris.”

The two officials’ public dustup amid Pennsylvania’s worst measles outbreak in decades, which left two unvaccinated people dead this week, played out in a series of posts on the social media site X, with Kennedy accusing the governor of “gaslighting” and Shapiro calling Kennedy’s claims “inaccurate and misleading.”

The kerfuffle began when Kennedy called Shapiro to ask whether the commonwealth needed additional support from the federal government in responding to the Lancaster County-centered measles outbreak, which began in April and thus far involves 412 reported cases – 94 of which were recorded in the last week alone, all in unvaccinated people.

The governor responded that Pennsylvania’s health establishment had the resources it needs: Nearly 100 pop-up clinics have immunized some 4,100 Pennsylvanians during the outbreak, with dozens more clinics planned amid a broadening of the state’s anti-measles effort announced by Shapiro this week. 

Instead, Shapiro urged Kennedy – an environmental lawyer with a long history of anti-vaccine activism – to use his platform to encourage more vaccination.

“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,’” wrote the governor on X about Kennedy, who in 2021 told a Lancaster County audience that “the cure for measles is chicken soup and vitamin A.”

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

Kennedy blasted back with a series of posts that began with a seemingly doctored photo collage of Dr. Stanley Plotkin, a world-renowned virologist, emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania and inventor of the rubella vaccine. The post shows Plotkin’s face superimposed against a nebulous backdrop of fetuses and the words “Aborted Fetal Tissue in Vaccines.”

“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,” Kennedy wrote, complaining that in a press conference earlier today, the governor “accused me of promoting conspiracy theories because I told him … that some Americans had religious objections to the MMR vaccine because it contained fetal tissue.”

Kennedy also complained that Shapiro had “accused me of promoting misinformation” on vaccine safety and efficacy that is partly to blame for the decline in Pennsylvania’s MMR vaccination rates – from about 97% for high school seniors to 93% in kindergarten classrooms statewide, dropping below the 95% threshold experts say confers herd immunity against viral disease.

“It’s unfortunately true that the government lockdowns, deceptions, manipulation, and overreach during Covid severely damaged public faith in the vaccine program,” he wrote. “Governor Shapiro’s press conference was an example of the same species of gaslighting.”

As secretary, however, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the panel of top vaccine experts that long served as a national authority. While the reconstituted committee has essentially halted activity, Kennedy has spearheaded efforts to reduce the federal immunization schedule from 17 to 11 vaccines, waving aside scientific consensus by questioning the value of many shots.

Across the commonwealth, public health leaders were alarmed by Kennedy’s latest efforts to sow doubts about the MMR vaccines, which have been safely used for generations, essentially eradicating measles in America before the vaccine-hesitancy movement facilitated its recent resurgence.

“Misinformation such as this only serves to create fear and doubt about what is an accepted scientific fact: vaccines save lives,” Andrew Lutzkanin, a physician who is the president of the Pennsylvania Academy of Family Physicians, told City & State.

“While human cell lines were used to grow these viruses when the vaccines were first developed, recent claims that they continue to contain ‘aborted fetal tissue’ represents a misunderstanding of how vaccines are manufactured today.” 

Pediatrician Paul Offit, the co-director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the co-creator of the 2006 rotavirus vaccine, dismissed Kennedy’s claims as “the usual anti-vaccine tropes.”

The original rubella component of the MMR vaccine was grown by Plotkin in a cell line sent to Penn’s Wistar Institute by a Swedish researcher who had obtained fetal cells from an elective abortion half a century ago, but “it’s not like they use new abortive material,” Offit explained.

He also dismissed Kennedy’s religious objections argument. “Where RFK Jr. is wrong is to in any way imply that that’s the issue for the Mennonites, because it’s not,” he went on, referring to one of the religious communities at the heart of the current Lancaster outbreak. “The Mennonite Church supports vaccination.”

And while residual fragments of human DNA are present in vaccines, he said, the Catholic Church ruled decades ago “that Catholics can certainly use vaccines because the Catholic Church, like all churches, cares about human life, and vaccines help preserve human life.”

Plotkin – now 94 – “has argued, and maybe correctly, that he’s probably prevented more abortions than the Catholic Church,” added Offit. That’s because before Plotkin’s rubella vaccine was available, thousands of women suffered spontaneous abortions due to rubella infections contracted while pregnant, while legions more “would decide to abort their child because they were infected in the first trimester and they didn’t want to deliver a child who was blind, deaf, and disabled, and had heart defects,” common outcomes of rubella in utero.

“What was Stanley trying to do? He was trying to prevent the 20,000 cases of congenital birth defects that occurred every year in this country, and he did it: We eliminated rubella from this country in 2005. So thank you, Dr. Plotkin,” Offit said. “And good for Gov. Shapiro.”