A New York coroner today confirmed that a 7-month-old Amish boy is the child that state health officials were referring to when they announced a “measles-associated death” late Monday.
Lewis County Coroner Jeffery Tompkins told The Defender today in an email that the infant was unvaccinated. However, Tompkins declined to say what the child’s death certificate or coroner’s report listed as the cause or causes of death.
Tompkins also declined to say if the child had any comorbidities or underlying illnesses.
The New York State Department of Health and Lewis County Public Health, which jointly announced the death, called it the “first known measles-associated death in New York State in more than 30 years.”
They did not provide details about the infant or whether medical authorities had determined the exact cause of death.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said she was “heartbroken” by the news and linked the child’s death to actions by the Trump administration. Hochul said:
“Measles is highly contagious, and vaccination remains our best protection against this dangerous disease. This is New York’s first measles-related death in 30 years, a devastating reminder of what’s at stake when Washington deliberately erodes decades of progress in protecting Americans from preventable illnesses.”
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) CEO Mary Holland said it was “unfortunate” that Hochul — who delivered her statement the night before the midterm elections — was “exploiting this situation for political purposes.”
“Any child’s death is a tragedy. This should be a time of grieving and investigation, not grandstanding and casting blame,” Holland said.
Health officials have released very little information about the circumstances surrounding the child’s death, Holland said. “Why are the health authorities saying ‘measles-associated death’ rather than a ‘measles death’? We don’t know.”
Although state and county health officials reported the death as being linked to measles, news reports were quick to characterize the death as having been due to measles.
For example, The New York Times ran an article under the headline, “Child Dies From Measles in New York State’s First Fatal Case in 30 Years.”
VAERS shows multiple measles-vaccine-related deaths in past 30 years
CHD Senior Research Scientist Karl Jablonowski said the state and county health departments’ joint statement contained “a touch of truth and a heavy dose of fallacy.”
Jablonowski explained:
“The touch of truth is that the last measles-associated death in New York was in the 1990-1991 season, 35 years ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“What makes the statement a fallacy is that the vaccine against the measles virus is itself a measles virus, albeit attenuated through chicken cells. And there have been 20 measles-vaccine-associated (and therefore measles-associated) deaths in New York since 1990, according to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System [VAERS], an under-reported passive surveillance system.”
The most recent VAERS report of a measles-vaccine-associated death is a 2025 report of a baby who died a few hours after her well-baby checkup, where she received 6 shots of 12 vaccines, he said.
Jablonowski added:
“Two years ago, a 20-month-old boy died 10 days after receiving the MMR and varicella vaccines. Six years ago, a 45-year-old man who received only the MMR had a seizure within 24 hours of vaccination and died the next day. All in the state of New York, all ignored by the New York State Department of Health with yesterday’s statement.”
Hochul declared state measles emergency in month leading up to midterms
The 7-month-old’s death comes nearly a month after Hochul declared a statewide measles emergency, citing rising measles cases in rural areas of New York and neighboring states.
Hochul made the declaration through an Executive Order, which allowed her to temporarily suspend or modify laws and ordinances that could hinder actions that health officials determine are necessary to cope with a disaster emergency.
The State Disaster Emergency is set to expire on Nov. 4, the day after the midterm elections, unless Hochul extends it.
The order relaxed rules for who can order measles tests and administer vaccines, making it easier for a wider group of health professionals — including paramedics, advanced emergency medical service providers, pharmacists and midwives — to administer measles shots.
It also suspended the requirement for adults to consent to have their vaccination status included in a state registry when they get immunized.
New York has a population of about 20 million people. As of Oct. 31, the state has reported 210 measles cases, according to the state’s measles dashboard.
The state health department’s measles update website makes multiple references to the risks associated with a measles infection without mentioning any of the risks of the MMR shot.
In an earlier interview with The Defender, CHD Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker criticized New York state for failing to inform people of the risks of vaccination and for not providing adequate information for people who do contract the disease.
“The New York state website is woefully inadequate for any individual who contracts the measles as it provides no information for treatment and prevention outside of vaccinating anything that moves,” he said.
“There are several good established protocols that may limit the severity of the infection and prevent progression to pneumonia, which may occur in about 5% of all cases.”
Hooker said New York health officials provide no information on risks versus benefits of vaccination to help people to make informed decisions.
New York doesn’t allow religious exemptions
New York is one of several states that fail to honor religious exemptions from vaccine mandates.
State authorities have fined Amish communities that fail to comply with the state’s school-based vaccination requirements. The U.S. Supreme Court has taken up the issue but has yet to rule on the constitutionality of New York state’s action.
Yesterday, CHD filed an amicus brief on behalf of the plaintiffs. CHD General Counsel Kim Mack Rosenberg said the court clerk has yet to approve the filing, which usually takes a few days.
California, Maine, Connecticut and West Virginia also do not allow religious exemptions.
New York has also started denying medical exemptions.
CHD is funding multiple lawsuits in the state, including one on behalf of 17-year-old Sarah Doe, who was forced out of school for not taking all state-mandated vaccines, even though numerous doctors have said she should be medically exempt from the requirement due to her precarious health and past adverse reactions.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
