Buggy clinics. Amish schoolhouse visits. Armed farm raids. Two disputed deaths. A pharma-funded task force with no public charter. And an 18-year federal war on Amish raw milk that RFK Jr. called “a long war by Big Ag, food processors and their government puppets to destroy family farms.”
The Pennsylvania Bureau of Immunizations director said publicly the Amish outreach program is designed to work “over generations.”
This article builds on my August 27 investigation, The Amish Are Being Targeted in Two States. Pennsylvania Calls It Outreach. — which catalogues the state’s tactical repertoire in full, quotes the McCleaf slide deck verbatim, and compares Pennsylvania’s “access-and-persuasion” model to a second state’s harsher approach. Read it for the primary sources. This piece names what the aggregate is.
The phrase to remember
On April 15, 2025, four months before the current Pennsylvania measles outbreak was declared, the Director of Pennsylvania’s Bureau of Immunizations, Tom McCleaf, briefed the Association of Immunization Managers on how his department planned to reach the Amish.
His slide, on the public record, describes a program of “horse and buggy clinics,” “mud sales” outreach, “Amish schoolhouse visits,” “in-home horse and buggy immunization services”, and free materials placed “at stores that they frequent and in farmer’s markets.”
McCleaf described the program’s purpose in a single phrase that should be read carefully: it is designed to work “over generations.”
That is not a public-health emergency. That is a cultural conversion program with a strategic time horizon.
And it is the largest state penetration of an American religious minority in living memory.
What the state is actually doing
By August 25, 2026, per the Shapiro administration’s own press release:
91 pop-up MMR clinics conducted since April 2026, with 40 more planned
4,100+ MMR doses administered at those clinics
35,000+ Pennsylvanians received MMR in July 2026 alone — 10,000 more than a typical month
1,000+ providers briefed in the two weeks before the August 25 announcement
Six school-based Vaccines for Children (VFC) sites in Lancaster County
Coordination with Lancaster EMS to provide in-home immunizations and local Federally Qualified Health Centers “to provide in-home horse and buggy immunization services”
The umbrella entity coordinating the Amish-specific work is the Health Improvement in Plain Population (HIPP) Task Force — a state-partnered body named as a formal partner in the Pennsylvania Department of Health’s Lancaster County immunization program by the Association of Immunization Managers case study, but whose organizational charter, membership roster, and funder disclosures are not on the public record.
For a religious community of roughly 43,000 people in one county, this is unprecedented. No other American religious minority is subject to state-run buggy clinics, in-home vaccination visits, or schoolhouse penetration campaigns.
The Lancaster County Coroner told LancasterOnline: “No measles deaths were handled by our office.”
What triggered it: two disputed deaths the coroner does not endorse
The entire state intervention is being justified by two deaths that a coroner will not certify as measles deaths.
Lancaster County Coroner Dr. Stephen Diamantoni told LancasterOnline that “no measles deaths were handled by our office” (The Hill, August 26, 2026; Daily Caller News Foundation, August 26, 2026).
The one case in Diamantoni’s office was an infant born with measles who died of a “traumatic laceration of the spleen.” Per FactCheck.org, August 28, 2026:
“On Aug. 26, the Philadelphia Inquirer said that Lancaster County Coroner Dr. Stephen Diamantoni told them that the child, a newborn who died shortly after birth, died of a spleen laceration, and that the pathologist who did the autopsy ‘did not feel it was related to measles.’”
“TribLive, a news outlet covering western Pennsylvania, reported on Aug. 27 that Diamantoni said the cause of death was a ‘traumatic laceration of the spleen’ and that the forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy, Dr. Wayne Ross, determined that measles was not a contributing factor to the death.”
Even Paul Offit — no ally of vaccine skeptics — acknowledged the ambiguity in his own Substack: the coroner stated that “measles was not the cause of death” (Offit Substack, August 29, 2026).
Only under sustained pressure did Diamantoni add measles to “Part II” of the death certificate — the section for “other conditions contributing to death but not resulting in the underlying cause.” He explained the change as offering “a broader view of the general health of the child.”
The state has separately acknowledged that its own term “measles-associated” includes cases where “the disease may not be assessed by the medical certifier or coroner to be the immediate cause of death” (FactCheck.org).
PA DOH has refused to release the ages, sex, comorbidities, or genotyping data for either death, citing “privacy.” But the CDC’s own clinical overview states plainly: “Genotyping is the only way to distinguish between wild-type measles virus infection and a rash caused by a recent measles vaccination.”
Two children died in Lancaster County. One infant had a torn spleen the pathologist said was not related to measles. The other case is entirely undescribed. Neither has been sequenced. Neither has been released. And the state is running 91 pop-up clinics in Amish country on the strength of these two cases.
The armed raid that came 20 months before the vaccine outreach
On January 4, 2024, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture — accompanied by two Pennsylvania State Police vehicles — arrived at Amos Miller’s Bird-in-Hand, Lancaster County farm to execute an administrative search warrant (Congress.gov hearing document; Food Safety News, January 6, 2024).
State officers removed coolers of food and placed an estimated $100,000 worth of Miller’s inventory — pickled beets, maple syrup, meat, eggnog — under detention orders (Organic Consumers Association; David Gumpert).
Nineteen days later, PA Attorney General Michelle Henry — appointed by Governor Shapiro — filed a 357-page civil action against Miller in Lancaster County Court of Common Pleas (Justia opinion; Food Safety News, January 2024). Miller was charged with violations of Pennsylvania’s:
Milk Sanitation Law
Food Safety Act
Retail Food Facility Safety Act
Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law
The same executive branch — Shapiro → AG Henry → Department of Agriculture → State Police — is now conducting the “voluntary” MMR outreach in the same community, in the same county, in the same window.
Amish families are receiving state medical teams at their doors in 2026 with the memory of state police cruisers idling in Amos Miller’s driveway 20 months earlier. That is not a neutral encounter. The raid is the message.
Every publicly documented armed raid on an American raw-milk farmer in the past two decades has targeted an Amish or Mennonite farmer.
The 18-year federal war on Amish raw milk
The Miller raid was not an isolated incident. It was the latest in an 18-year documented pattern of armed federal and state raids on Amish raw-milk farmers. This pattern is what RFK Jr., writing in March 2024, called “the final stage of a long war by Big Ag, food processors and their government puppets to destroy family farms and wholesome food production.”
The record:
April 25, 2008 — Newville, Cumberland County, PA. Mennonite dairy farmer Mark Nolt was raided for the third time by six Pennsylvania state troopers plus agents from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. Nolt was arrested, handcuffed, and $20,000-$30,000 of milk, cheese, and butter was seized. Nolt told reporters: “They swooped in on Friday morning like a bunch of Vikings, handcuffed me and stole $30,000 worth of my milk, cheese and butter” (BoingBoing, February 2011; Real Milk timeline; SourceWatch). Total losses over three raids: $100,000.
April 20, 2010 — Kinzers, Lancaster County, PA. 5 a.m. armed raid on Dan Allgyer’s Rainbow Acres Farm. FDA agents, U.S. marshals, and a Pennsylvania State Police trooper arrived at dawn to execute a warrant after a year-long FDA undercover sting operation — including agents using aliases in a Yahoo user group to place orders under fake names (Washington Times, April 28, 2011; Reason, June 2011; Grist, May 2011). Allgyer’s sole crime: selling raw milk to informed adult customers who wanted it. The FDA’s Obama-era food safety czar publicly defended the armed raid. In February 2012, a federal judge issued a permanent injunction. Allgyer shut down his farm entirely (Washington Times, February 13, 2012).
June 2, 2010 — Loganville, Wisconsin. Wisconsin Department of Agriculture agents, accompanied by armed sheriff deputies, raided Amish/Mennonite dairy farmer Vernon Hershberger’s Grazin’ Acres farm. Agents placed seals on his coolers and freezers and threw a vial of blue dye into a milk tank containing 2,000 pounds of raw milk to destroy it (Modern Farmer, May 2013; Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund). A jury acquitted Hershberger on three of four charges in May 2013 (Cornucopia Institute).
2016-2023 — Amos Miller, Bird-in-Hand, PA. Seven years of federal litigation. The USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service began investigating Miller in 2016. The Department of Justice secured a permanent injunction in 2019. Miller was found in contempt in 2021 and fined $250,000 (Amish America, 2022). Multiple consent decrees followed. In July 2021, Federal Judge Edward G. Smith signed a 39-page order threatening Miller with imprisonment and $25,000-per-day penalties. The case only closed with a “Third Consent Decree” in August 2023 after Miller paid roughly $85,000 in fines (Food Safety News, November 2023).
January 4, 2024 — Amos Miller, again. This time by Pennsylvania State Police + PA Department of Agriculture. Five months after Miller settled the federal case, the state opened its own front. Over $100,000 of food detained. 357-page state civil complaint filed by AG Michelle Henry. Miller has been operating under state injunction ever since (Congress.gov).
April 9, 2025 — Congressional hearing on the Miller raid. Congressional record: “Raid on Farm Sparks Debate Over Raw Milk Oversight and Amish Farmer Amos Miller.” The raid became a matter of federal legislative record.
Every publicly documented armed raid on an American raw-milk farmer in the past two decades has targeted an Amish or Mennonite farmer. Every one.
Non-Amish raw milk producers in states where raw milk is legal are not raided at 5 a.m. by armed agents. The 18-year enforcement history is not about food safety — it is about a very specific religious minority whose food and healing traditions include raw milk, and whose refusal to obtain state permits has been made a matter of federal criminal enforcement.
RFK Jr., writing publicly in March 2024, put it as plainly as anyone: “This is the final stage of a long war by Big Ag, food processors and their government puppets to destroy family farms and wholesome food production. Thank you Amos for standing up for our health and our liberty to grow healthy food.”
Why raw milk matters — and why the establishment must destroy the messenger
Raw milk is not a peripheral issue. It is central to why the current attacks are happening, and central to why RFK Jr. — the sitting HHS Secretary — has been the target of a coordinated media war since his confirmation.
Raw milk from pasture-fed cows sits at the exact intersection of everything the current pharmaceutical-industrial system cannot tolerate:
It is a whole, unadulterated food that competes with pharmaceutical products. The traditional health effects historically claimed for raw milk — improved digestion, reduced eczema and allergy, restoration of gut microbiome — are precisely the conditions that generate billions of dollars in prescription revenue for antihistamines, immunosuppressants, probiotics, digestive-enzyme supplements, and biologics.
It is regulated as if it were poison. The FDA banned interstate raw milk sales in 1987. Twenty states still prohibit intrastate raw milk sales entirely. The federal position, per FDA spokesperson Tamara N. Ward, is that “raw milk should never be consumed”. This is a categorical position that has no European analog: raw milk vending machines operate legally in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.
It is culturally central to Amish food sovereignty. The Amish community’s food system was built on unpasteurized dairy for centuries. Prohibiting raw milk is not merely a food-safety regulation — it is a targeted attack on the internal economic sovereignty of the Amish community, which sells directly to health-freedom-oriented consumers nationwide through private membership associations.
And now the establishment has weaponized RFK Jr.’s well-known raw-milk consumption against him. Every one of the following headlines was published to erode his credibility since his confirmation as HHS Secretary:
“RFK Jr. Was Raw Milk’s Biggest Fan. Now He Won’t Return Industry Calls.” — Mother Jones, January 30, 2026
“RFK Jr. Once Celebrated Raw Milk. Now, A Baby Has Died From Bacteria Linked To Unpasteurized Dairy” — IFLScience, February 5, 2026
“The raw milk movement is dumb and dangerous, but don’t blame Kennedy” — Washington Post, April 14, 2026
“Led by RFK Jr., conservatives embrace raw milk. Regulators say it’s dangerous.” — News-Medical, January 2025
“Raw milk advocates wonder: Where is Kennedy?” — NBC News, June 20, 2025
The media strategy is transparent: frame every raw milk illness as a Kennedy failure, frame every measles case as vindication of the vaccine schedule Kennedy is reforming, and frame every Amish farmer as an unsafe outlier whose “misinformation” is killing children. The Lancaster measles outbreak — with two deaths the coroner will not certify as measles deaths — is the political vehicle. The Amish are the political target. Kennedy is the political prize.
The retaliation loop nobody talks about
There is one more piece of evidence that makes the pattern impossible to dismiss as coincidence: Kennedy’s HHS has demonstrated the political willingness to punish organizations that publicly oppose his reforms. But the reverse is also true — and better documented.
In December 2025, HHS terminated seven federal grants totaling roughly $18.6 million to the American Academy of Pediatrics (Washington Post, December 17, 2025; Rep. Krishnamoorthi letter to HHS). AAP had recently filed a federal lawsuit challenging Kennedy’s changes to the vaccine schedule.
On January 11, 2026, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell granted AAP a preliminary injunction (JD Supra legal summary, January 29, 2026; Clearinghouse case documentation) — restoring the grants and ruling that AAP was likely to succeed on its First Amendment retaliation claim.
The judge found:
“Substantial and undisputed evidence that statements and actions by HHS leadership reflected a retaliatory motive tied to AAP’s protected advocacy on childhood vaccination and gender-affirming care. HHS’s stated rationale — realignment with agency priorities — was deemed not plausible, particularly because the affected grants had nothing to do with those contested topics.”
This ruling is the smoking gun for how the game is now being played. A federal judge has ruled that the current administration will use grant funding to punish medical organizations for their advocacy. That is documented federal-court finding, and it applies in both directions: whoever holds executive power over HHS grant flows can retaliate against advocacy that opposes them.
But what the AAP retaliation tells us about the current moment is more important than the retaliation itself. It tells us: the medical establishment now understands that its speech has political consequences. AAP is now suing to defend $12 million. Merck disclosed in its 10-K that Kennedy’s vaccine schedule reforms are a material investor risk. Pfizer’s 10-K calls out “the evolving vaccine landscape.”
Every entrenched interest that benefits from mandatory vaccination — pharma, AAP, IDSA, the immunization action coalitions — needs the measles outbreak narrative to stick, needs Amish “vaccine hesitancy” to be publicly framed as the cause, and needs Kennedy’s raw-milk-drinking Amish-defending public position to be discrediting rather than principled. The Pennsylvania outbreak is not just a public-health event. It is a proxy war.
The HIPP Task Force is named as a state partner. Its charter, membership, and funders are not on the public record.
The HIPP Task Force operates in the dark
Here is what the state will not tell you.
My August 27, 2026 Substack — flagging the state’s own AIM slide deck — identified the coordinating body: the Health Improvement in Plain Population (HIPP) Task Force. Named as a “partner” in the state’s operational documents. But the state has published no:
Charter
Membership roster
Governance documents
Funder disclosures
Meeting minutes
Financial reporting
A state-partnered task force targeting a religious community’s medical practices is operating without a single public governance document. That is either extreme institutional laziness or deliberate opacity. Given how carefully every other Pennsylvania executive-branch coordination document is filed, indexed, and searchable, the answer is not laziness.
The task force sits inside a documented pharma-funded ecosystem. Every organization publicly conducting Amish outreach — Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health / ChildProtect, the Immunization Action Coalition / Immunize.org, the Lancaster County Immunization Coalition, the American Academy of Pediatrics Pennsylvania Chapter — has documented pharmaceutical-industry funding. Merck, Pfizer, Moderna, and Sanofi are the top-tier AAP “Corporate Summit” donors at $50,000+ annually per firm (Undark investigation, September 2025). Merck contributed $10,000 to Shapiro-Davis Inauguration in 2023 and $25,000 to “Real Results for Pennsylvania” (Shapiro’s leadership PAC) in 2025 — arriving during the same year as Executive Order 2025-02 expanding vaccine access.
The people knocking on Amish doors have a paper trail leading back to the corporations whose revenue depends on the outcome. That paper trail is exactly what a Right-to-Know Law request is designed to expose. I have filed three of them today. I will publish every response, in full, as it arrives.
The 34-year pharma-hospital infrastructure built specifically for this
The current campaign is not novel. It is the intensification of a 34-year infrastructure specifically built to convert Amish medical practice.
Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health’s “ChildProtect” program launched in 1991 as an emergency response to a German measles outbreak in the Amish community (Penn Medicine, November 2019; Penn Today, July 2018).
By 2019, that program had provided 167,000 immunizations to nearly 75,000 children (Penn Medicine 2019 case study). By 2025 the running total was ~80,000 children immunized across roughly 30 years (Penn Medicine, September 2025). Per the American Hospital Association’s 2015 report on the “Amish Neighbor Partnership”: “Since 1991, LGH has immunized 70,000 children, 46 percent from the Amish community” (AHA case study).
The ChildProtect program is funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Health’s Vaccines for Children program (Penn Medicine, September 2025) — meaning federal-state taxpayer money has flowed through a Penn Medicine hospital system for 34 years specifically to reach Amish children.
The AHA case study also documents that LGH’s CEO “meets quarterly with Amish bishops” and that since 2009 the program has been “hosting health education programs in the homes of Amish women.” This is the definition of long-term institutional access to a religious minority — access that most American medical systems could only dream of achieving with their own patient populations.
Now stack it: 34 years of institutional access + 91 pop-up MMR clinics + in-home immunization services + Amish schoolhouse visits + a state Bureau of Immunizations director openly saying the program is designed to work “over generations.” This is not an emergency response. It is an intensification of a decades-long conversion project.
The academic community already said this is wrong
A 2023 peer-reviewed paper explicitly named the current approach as ethically improper. From PMC11759493 (2023):
“Because Amish are not as much ‘hard to reach’ as ‘hard to vaccinate,’ we suggest service providers and policymakers avoid top-down approaches that target the Amish — including cultural competency strategies that work to reduce perceived boundaries — and instead give Amish space to either initiate bottom-up partnerships with health services or accept responsibility for undervaccination in public life.”
A peer-reviewed academic paper — not an “anti-vaccine” outlet, not a conservative journal, but the biomedical literature — explicitly told policymakers three years ago: stop targeting the Amish with cultural-competency approaches designed to erode their community boundaries.
The state of Pennsylvania is doing precisely what the academic literature said not to do.
The exemption elimination pincer
While the state is running the vaccine outreach with one hand, the political ecosystem it operates in is working with the other hand to eliminate the last legal option Amish parents have to keep their children in Amish schoolhouses.
Six states have already eliminated non-medical vaccine exemptions: Mississippi, West Virginia, California, New York, Maine, and Connecticut. The American Academy of Pediatrics formally reaffirmed its exemption-elimination policy in July 2025, calling on states to “eliminate all nonmedical exemptions.” Pharma-funded advocacy organizations — Vaccinate Your Family, Voices for Vaccines, the Immunization Action Coalition, the Task Force for Global Health — actively lobby for exemption bills in every state legislature.
If Pennsylvania follows — and its legislature is currently debating exemption bills — Amish parents lose the legal ability to send unvaccinated children to school. Amish education is grade-8-terminal in one-room schoolhouses. There is no “homeschool around it” option that lets an Amish family sidestep exemption elimination the way a Silicon Valley family might. Exemption elimination in Pennsylvania is direct legal pressure on the internal educational sovereignty of the Amish community.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania statutory law caps eminent-domain relocation support for farms at $25,000 — a number that would not move a single silo, let alone an operating dairy (The Amish Way, August 2026). If Pennsylvania ever chooses to invoke eminent domain against Amish farmland — as it did against non-Amish farmers along the Sunoco Mariner East pipeline — the community has no financial ability to relocate.
The community is being pincered from three directions simultaneously: medical (91 pop-up clinics + in-home immunization), agricultural (raid + injunction + food-safety enforcement), and educational (exemption elimination). Each individual policy is defensible on its own terms. The aggregate is a systematic erosion of Amish community self-governance across every dimension of daily life.
What no coverage has connected — yet. Between January 2025 and August 2026, Pennsylvania farmland has moved to data-center developers at unprecedented scale. Ninety-six families in Salem Township, Luzerne County, sold 1,700 acres to a Blackstone-affiliated shell company for $586 million in a single closing. CoreWeave broke ground on a $6 billion Lancaster County campus in February 2025 on 144 acres of former commercial farmland at 216 Greenfield Road and 1375 Harrisburg Pike. The QTS Salem Township investment tops $10 billion.
Pennsylvania statute caps eminent-domain relocation support for a displaced farm at $25,000. Whether these two operations — the multi-generational vaccination campaign on the Plain community and the largest farmland-to-data-center transfer in state history — share coordinating personnel, funding, or intent is a question I will address in a forthcoming investigation. What I can say now: they are happening in the same state, in the same window, and are targeting the same population.
Part 2 coming next week. Subscribe to receive it.
What we call this, honestly
This is what religious persecution looks like in a country with a First Amendment and an FDA.
It is not stormtroopers rounding up families. It is buggy clinics with Vaccines for Children program funding. It is state police escorts for food-safety inspectors. It is 357-page civil actions in Lancaster County Court of Common Pleas. It is peer-reviewed academic warnings ignored. It is pharma-funded task forces without published charters. It is a coroner who won’t certify measles deaths having his careful language stripped from the state’s press releases. It is the sitting HHS Secretary being framed in Mother Jones as a raw-milk enthusiast responsible for the death of an infant that the FDA’s own data says was almost certainly caused by other bacteria, weeks before he took office.
Every individual action is defensible in isolation. Every institutional actor is procedurally correct at every step. The aggregate is systematic and coordinated cultural pressure on a religious minority whose only crime is choosing to live differently — with unpasteurized milk, in one-room schoolhouses, with older medical traditions than the pharmaceutical industry that now demands compliance.
This is plausibly deniable persecution. It is the modern American form. It works by procedure, not by force. It is enabled by institutional capture, not by direct violence. And it is more effective, not less, than the historical forms.
What I am asking of readers
Three things.
First, help me obtain the documents. I have filed three Pennsylvania Right-to-Know Law requests today — to the PA Department of Health for the HIPP Task Force charter, funders, and correspondence; to the Governor’s Office for coordination correspondence with pharmaceutical companies and data-center developers; and to the PA Department of State for lobbying and campaign finance disclosures. Under the Right-to-Know Law, each agency must respond within 5 business days. Every citizen of Pennsylvania has the right to file the same requests.
Second, share this story. The Amish do not have a lobbying organization. They do not have a PAC. They do not have paid social-media staff. The Amos Miller GiveSendGo campaign is at $318,000 — laughable compared to the $10 billion QTS Salem Township investment or the $6 billion Lancaster CoreWeave campus, both fast-tracked by the same governor whose administration is running the vaccine outreach. If this story is going to reach the American public, it will reach through the alternative media, plainly, without institutional support.
Third, remember what the state’s own director said. “Over generations.” No public-health emergency operates on the timeline of generations. Only a cultural conversion project does. And no free society allows one of its executive branches to run a generational conversion project against a peaceful religious minority — with pharma-funded coordinating bodies, armed farm raids, hospitalized deaths that the coroner won’t certify, and public-record documents the state refuses to release.
We are watching the machinery of the state be used against Americans who never asked for its help and never consented to its authority over their food, their farms, their schools, their children, or their bodies. If we do not name it now, before the RTK responses come back, we will be trying to explain it after the fact.
The name for this is persecution. Plausibly deniable. Procedurally airtight. And happening right now in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
They've deployed this same long-term op against American Indians for decades. Exact same blueprint. They reach into the children, get them educated in the indoctrination systems we call public schools, some get into private top tier. Once fully indoctrinated they get sent back to their tribes and try to cajole and push/entice their families, friends, tribal elders into adopting the White man's ways. Call their heritage backwards and old-fashioned. And before you know it the elders committed to natural ways die off and the next generation of leaders isn't as committed to the old, healthy ways.
They've wrecked tribal peoples as a result. They trick them with 'safe and effective' promises, prey on their innocence and trust. And they do the same to Amish.
The Amish would be wise to reject all entrees from the outside world. It will only destroy them. They'll be left with the empty shell of Amish identity, with no Amish values and understandings of the world their ancestors passed down. Pennsylvania and federal authorities are evil to do this to them, as they are for what they've done to American Indians.
White Man speak with forked tongue. They used to know this.
You have to understand the reality of the Amish remaining outside the tentacles of The Elites. I firmly believe that we are being poisoned by BigPharma, BigAg and BigFood....
The Amish are the Control Group...
The fact that their families are large, their testosterone levels are normal, their phycological issues are minimal will point the way to prove that we in America and Europe - The West - have been purposefully poisoned. It's the same people who have opened our borders and foisted White/black interbreeding on us as some kind of normal.
The Elites go by other names... See Kalergi.....