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Something really batshit happened just a few hours ago: The CDC contradicted the Pennsylvania State Department of Health’s announcement that two people in the state had died of measles.

For context: There’s recently been a huge measles outbreak in that state, part of an ongoing uptick in cases nationwide over the last two-plus years. On Tuesday, August 25, the Pennsylvania health department announced two people had died from the infection, but didn’t give their names or additional details — common details to withhold out of privacy concerns.

Sowahahaponwuz, the CDC.gov account on X reposted a post from Department of Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. saying Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro had rushed with “giddy delight” to attribute the deaths to measles. The CDC post itself suggested “discrepancies” in the information coming out of Pennsylvania. 

For more context: This is wild as hell! The CDC typically takes a supportive and even deferential posture toward states, especially during outbreak situations. But we’re not in normal times. 

Pennsylvania Secretary of Health responded with her own post reaffirming that the two deaths were related to measles infections and expressing appreciation for the good working relationship her department has with the CDC professional staff. (I suspect she is referring there to CDC’s rank-and-file rather than its new leadership, potentially including its new communications director.)

Do you have intel on wtf is going on here? Email me at [email protected], fill out this form, or find me on Signal at kerenlandman.07.

Last week, I asked if my new mission statement made sense. Appreciate the 19 of you who responded, 16 of whom thought I was a genius. Thanks for noticing! 

Also, 2 of you thought it was fine but nothing new, which I really want to hear more about. If you or anyone else cares to tell me more, I am extremely here for it!

(If everyone’s already aware of the bidirectional trust problem and the effed up system that’s the real common enemy of both health workers and the public, how are they trying to fix it? Have people just given up on fixing it altogether? What, if anything, would renew their hope?)

I’m super curious, so as ever, reach out using either of the buttons at the bottom of this page if you feel like talking about it.

These polls are pretty fun, so you’ll see more questions in future posts, including this one.

(Please note that clicking poll responses is completely anonymous, but if you click “share additional feedback” after you click, anything you add will have your name attached.)

A couple of weeks ago, after I pushed back on the way another doctor-writer was talking about MAHA, I promised my next post would unpack why I think so many health professionals use the same tone he did in similar scenarios.

Well, I didn’t. Instead, I got sidetracked by the minor (“minor”) business of being thunderclapped by my personal mission. And then something extraordinary happened this week, which I need to talk about even though it’s not exactly related to trust in health, except that maybe it is. 

What happened is that nearly everybody in the very politically divided United States, where everything seems either Republican- or Democrat-coded, agreed on something. Twice.

The country music superstar and philanthropist/icon/national treasure Dolly Parton died on Tuesday, and in the days since, the entire country has unanimously agreed: she was good. As I type, the White House is flying its flag at half-staff for the same person being grieved as an LGBTQ rights champion. This is something!

Around the same time, news broke about several high-profile, bipartisan political U-turns over data centers. Texas’ Republican governor and Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, several GOP Senate candidates, and others are all having a simultaneous “oh shit moment,” as one AI industry advocate put it. Turns out they all realized pretty much everyone agrees data centers are bad. Now, a Tea Party-aligned bus tour is organizing rallies to revolt against the same cause opposed by the progressive environmental group Honor the Earth and several state NAACP chapters. This is also something!

Lately (see aforementioned thunderclap), I’ve been having intrusive thoughts about what makes people trust health communication, or not. So I’ve been thinking about what lessons there are for health communicators in this moment: