The CDC’s decision to scrub two Pennsylvania measles deaths from its public tally, replacing them with an asterisk, has experts asking whether the agency is quietly moving the goalposts on what counts as a measles death. As MedPage Today’s Kristina Fiore reports, the removal came at the request of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who asked CDC Director Erica Schwartz, MD, to take the numbers down earlier this month.
The asterisk leads to a note saying the CDC is working with the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) to “develop a standardized case definition for deaths due to measles.” That collaboration is real, but CSTE says it wasn’t the CDC’s idea. The workgroup launched earlier this summer as part of a longstanding consensus-building process, according to CSTE spokesperson Amy Heldman, MPH.
“Determining how diseases and conditions are monitored and investigated and how data are shared at the national level is a rigorous, collaborative process,” Heldman said.
The CDC’s note also says the National Center for Health Statistics has no 2026 death records listing measles as the underlying cause. That’s a puzzling yardstick, since NCHS isn’t built for outbreak tracking. That job has historically fallen to the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System, which compiles state reports.
“Typically, the CDC goes with whatever the state reports,” said a CDC source familiar with the process who asked not to be named. The shift raises red flags, the source added: “It’s almost like the CDC wants to make it more difficult to count confirmed deaths.”
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Meanwhile, the measles resurgence that began in 2025 rolls on. Pennsylvania now reports four measles-associated deaths and 792 cases in 2026, including 97 in the past week alone, putting it among the hardest-hit states alongside Texas, South Carolina, and Utah. Texas’s three measles deaths from last year, notably, still appear on the CDC’s website.
