A six-week-old baby girl in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, died from measles, the county coroner confirmed to local press on Friday. Stephen Diamantoni, a Republican elected coroner in 2007, told Lancaster Online that the baby died at home. "I believe it was the 18th of August," he said. He also noted that the baby had a genetic condition called Amish lethal microcephaly, in which babies are born with unusually small heads and underdeveloped brains. The condition is caused by a mutation in the SLC25A19 gene, which codes for a protein involved with energy-producing enzymes in the mitochondria and is thought to be important for brain development. About 1 in 500 babies in the Old Order Amish population of Pennsylvania is born with the condition. Infants with the disorder only survive for about six months. Diamantoni confirmed to Lancaster Online that while microcephaly was present, measles was the cause of death.

The death is one of two that the state's health department announced last week as being from measles, according to a response from the state health department sent to Ars Technica Friday. Additionally on Friday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro shared a local news report about the coroner's confirmation on social media. The tragic deaths—both in infants, the other a newborn boy—have been engulfed in a firestorm of controversy sparked when anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed without evidence that the state may have "fabricated" them.

Kennedy ordered Erica Schwartz, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to remove the deaths from the agency's data. CDC staff had already accepted the deaths as being from measles and had reported them as such. Schwartz reportedly removed them from the public website without objection, though a report on Thursday revealed they are still included in an internal CDC database. The deaths remain excluded from the CDC's public-facing data as of Friday afternoon, with only an asterisk in the chart where 2026 measles deaths would be reported.

Prior to Kennedy's interference, state and local health departments were solely responsible for making determinations of measles-associated deaths, and the CDC reported the information it received.