MThe hay sale was more than a figure of speech last week at the New Holland auction house in Pennsylvania, where a ton of prime hay bales fetched more than $400, up about 20 percent from last year.
For members of the Lancaster Colony, a term used to describe the Amish population that settled here in 1760, the price of hay was only part of the discussion: the price of horses, donkeys, and milk were also topics of conversation and, as has been the case for the past year or more, a potentially deadly measles outbreak.
In the most recent count, 1,398 cases were detected, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Health. Since August 1, 150,000 doses of MMR vaccine have been administered, including more than 50,000 in October alone.
The outbreak and the politics surrounding it under the leadership of Robert F Kennedy Jr, the Secretary of Health, have focused on Lancaster County, placing the Amish in the spotlight. Although there is no Amish religious opposition to vaccines in general, one study found that less than a third of Amish residents had been immunized against measles, mumps and rubella.
“This wasn’t the case 50 years ago in our community,” said Christ Stoltzfoos, standing in front of a stable housing horses, miniature ponies and donkeys also up for auction. But Stoltzfoos could not clearly explain why vaccinations had failed in this community, which descends from German-speaking religious conservatives and where the modern world is largely kept at arm’s length.
His entire immediate family had been vaccinated and did not get sick, but some cousins were not and were, Stoltzfoos said.
“I guess no one can change their minds. The people who changed their minds are the ones who got really sick from this. They now say they would have gotten vaccinated. But the people who didn’t really get sick, they still say, ‘Oh, it’s not really that bad.'”
The attention the Amish received while experiencing the nation’s worst outbreak was not always welcome. But the state, under the leadership of Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor, mounted an intensive campaign of pop-up clinics and mailings to encourage the community to protect themselves.
The Lancaster Colony depends largely on tourism, with busloads of visitors stopping to buy Shoofly pies and other Amish delicacies. Vaccination is therefore partly a business decision. Yet nearly two-thirds of measles cases in Pennsylvania are among adults, which is the opposite of how measles is typically transmitted.
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, all five deaths in Pennsylvania involved people who were not vaccinated by choice or because they were too young to receive it.
But within the Lancaster community, vaccines do not necessarily convey the politicization of the “English” world. “A lot of people are getting vaccinated now,” Stoltzfoos said.
Nearby, John Kaufman, 81, was operating from a different playbook. He said the vaccine was hard on the immune system. “You get measles and you get over it. People get it once, and that’s it. But if you hurt your immune system with the shots, something else will come along. The vaccine will cure measles, but it will stir up something else. So what?”
He highlighted reports that Covid injections had been linked to heart attacks and, he said, cancer: “If you are strong and healthy, you might be able to knock out the Covid injection. But if you had a weakness in yourself, it might take over.”
Anna, a young woman at the auction, also said she had had measles. “It was miserable,” she said. “My whole family had it, except my father. He was vaccinated. I wouldn’t get vaccinated now because if you had measles, you get worse from it. Why change that?”
The thinking around the measles vaccine in the community is in some ways a reflection of the thinking in the “English” world beyond, where health officials have been battling outbreaks in South Carolina and Texas for much of the last year. But these epidemics mainly affect children.
Pennsylvania has recorded five deaths associated with measles (including two infants and three adults with underlying health conditions), but these numbers are not reflected in CDC data, which records three deaths nationwide out of 4,588 confirmed cases in 2026.
This month, Kennedy, who leads the vaccine-skeptic Maha Movement, claimed that “the people of Pennsylvania have suffered” because Shapiro’s administration politicized the state’s measles outbreak.
Kennedy said a “global measles epidemic” had been caused by fewer people receiving the measles vaccine during Covid. Pennsylvania, which accounts for 27% of U.S. cases, had only begun requesting emergency assistance from the CDC in September.
But Shapiro claimed the CDC would not properly acknowledge measles-related deaths “because it doesn’t fit their false narrative. I think RFK is causing great destruction in this country by stoking this vaccine skepticism.” The state sent 300 Department of Health workers to the region and administered nearly 6,000 vaccinations.
Vaccination policy has also reached the race for Pennsylvania’s 11th Congressional District, where five-term Republican Rep. Lloyd Smucker is being challenged by Democrat Nancy Mannion. At a public discussion last week, Smucker, who was raised among the Amish until age five, said the Amish made the decisions they thought were best for their families.
“The role of government should be to do research and development on vaccines and be open and transparent about what that means. I was disappointed to see the governor using measles to score political points,” he said. “It turns out that the first two deaths were actually not caused by measles at all. »
But Mannion, a former emergency room nurse and international healthcare leader, told the Guardian: “The Amish are not anti-vaccination, but they don’t access the healthcare system in the same way. It’s not just the Amish who are part of this epidemic because of vaccine skepticism which I would link directly to Robert Kennedy Jr.”
Measles, Mannion said, “is completely preventable and has been eradicated, but we are now living in a surge. I would say there is a connection between his anti-vaccine stance in general and what we are seeing now.”
The Amish of Lancaster are not the only such community experiencing larger political forces. In upstate New York, the state health department battled three small Amish schools over whether children fell under vaccination rules or should be granted an exemption on grounds of freedom of religious practice.
Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, recently declared a statewide health emergency after more than 100 people contracted measles, an outbreak that epidemiologists believe is linked to the outbreak in Pennsylvania and also the one in Ohio. Schools now face fines of $2,000 per unvaccinated student.
Steven Nolt, professor of history and Anabaptist studies at Elizabethtown College, emphasizes that it is through family tradition and not religious instruction that the Amish accept or refuse vaccinations. At the same time, he said, there is evidence that vaccine-skeptical groups have been conducting outreach to the Amish since 2015.
But it’s difficult to get accurate information, he says. “We don’t have hard data, but it’s clear that they are undervaccinated, but we don’t know to what extent. The Amish are a religious group, so governments are not allowed to track the information. We don’t know how many Amish are immune any better than how many Anglicans or Presbyterians are immune.”
At the New Holland auction, the measles issue was actually less pressing than land values, interest rates, the cost of diesel, hay and cattle. The Amish were to some extent protected from the price of fuel because they use horses in the fields, but also exposed because of their use of diesel generators, pickers, and milking machines.
A shift in agricultural practices from crops and livestock to milk and vegetables also brought changes, and many abandoned farming to move into furniture making and construction. Dairy prices were down, but organic milk was a good deal, Christ and his uncle Amos Stoltzfoos agreed, with 100 pounds bringing $51.
“We’re at their mercy, but I don’t think we’re being misused,” Christ said of the dairy companies. But illegal raw milk sales to New York consumers have also become an external political issue.
“I think it’s good that they regulate raw milk, otherwise it will soon be like measles,” Christ Stoltzfoos said. Both agree that the Amish do not like to deal directly with the government. “Most of us don’t even know what’s going on,” the young man said. “I read the newspaper but it doesn’t tell me much.”
Gn Health
