As Pennsylvania battles one of its largest measles outbreaks, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s long-standing anti-vaccine rhetoric and recent influence in affected communities highlight ongoing challenges in immunisation efforts amid rising distrust and misinformation.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s long history of attacking vaccines has come into sharp relief as measles spreads again in Pennsylvania, with Lancaster County at the centre of one of the state’s biggest outbreaks. According to the Genetic Literacy Project, Kennedy told an Amish audience in Lancaster County in 2021 that health authorities would try to force vaccination on the community because they could not tolerate its health, and he mocked his own measles illness by saying “the cure for measles is chicken soup and vitamin A”. Five years later, he now leads the federal health department while Lancaster County is tied to more than 230 confirmed cases.
The outbreak has unfolded in a community where vaccination has long lagged. State data cited in the report put measles vaccination among Lancaster County Amish communities at about one quarter in 2025, while kindergarten vaccination countywide fell to 88 per cent from 94 per cent in 2019. Local doctors say that picture is more complicated than simple refusal: Dr Jeffrey Martin of Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health said the Amish were not a group that “simply doesn’t vaccinate”, while Allen Hoover, who spent two decades running vaccine outreach in the area, said trust eroded sharply during the Covid era after years of progress.
Kennedy’s Lancaster stop was not an isolated episode. The Genetic Literacy Project said he travelled to Samoa in 2019, months before a measles epidemic that killed 83 people, and that Children’s Health Defense ran Facebook ads reaching roughly 110,000 people with false claims linking the MMR vaccine to autism and chronic illness. Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist and author, told The New York Times that the tactic of targeting insular communities is a standard anti-vaccine playbook: build on existing distrust and intensify it.
Pennsylvania officials are now trying to contain the fallout. The state health department launched a measles dashboard in July 2026 to give families county-level information on cases, ages and hospitalisations, and said staff in Lancaster County more than tripled the number of measles vaccines given in 2026 compared with 2025. In June, officials warned that a Lancaster County resident with measles may have exposed shoppers at a Kohl’s store on Lincoln Highway East, and in February they confirmed the first five cases of the year in the county, all in unvaccinated people. Health authorities say measles spreads easily through droplets and can linger in the air for up to two hours, making vaccination the main line of defence as Pennsylvania continues to track cases concentrated in people who are not fully immunised.
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