On August 30 you brought national attention to the Amish pediatric neurodevelopmental profile. In the same weeks, Pennsylvania is running a residential pyrethroid fogging program whose documented geography overlaps the western edge of the Lancaster Amish settlement, and whose full 2026 township-level spray log has not been made public. This letter asks you to see the collision — and to demand the records that would settle its extent, this week.
Mr. President,
Your recent public comments on Amish pediatric health put a distinctive comparison population at the center of the national conversation. Fact-checkers rushed in. Autism does exist in the Amish community, and independent researchers caution that Amish prevalence is difficult to measure with confidence and not directly comparable to CDC surveillance figures (STAT News; Washington Examiner; BBC Verify).
This letter does not depend on the strong version of the claim. It depends only on the modest fact your post surfaced: the Amish are a distinctive natural comparison population for pediatric health research, and the federal government has treated them as one for decades.
What the fact-checkers did not tell you — and what my own audit of fourteen mainstream fact-checks and explainers of the 2010 IMFAR Amish autism study (Paper 7336) documents — is that the study underlying every one of those fact-checks screened 1,899 Amish children in Ohio and Indiana between September 2008 and October 2009, confirmed 7 cases of Autism Spectrum Disorder, and collected a full vaccination history on every child screened. The vaccination-stratified analysis of those 7 confirmed cases has never been published. Sixteen years later, the IMFAR abstract remains the only written product of the 1,899-child screening. Of the fourteen fact-checks I audited, zero mentioned the vaccination-history sentence, zero mentioned that vaccination data had been collected but not published in stratified form, and zero asked what happened to the data.
That pattern — data collected, data not published, ecosystem incurious about the omission — is the antecedent to what I am writing to you about today. The disclosure gap in the 2010 study is the disclosure gap the 2026 Pennsylvania spray log is on track to reproduce. In each case, the question the data would answer is a question that never gets asked because the data never becomes public in the form required to answer it. That is the pattern I am asking your administration to break.
The National Institute on Aging’s own Amish Protective Variant Study cohort description says it in institutional voice: “Anecdotally, their agrarian lifestyle and firm behavioral norms likely have reduced variation in environmental exposures” (NIAGADS Amish Protective Variant Study). This is why the NIH funds Amish cohort research on Alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular disease, longevity, and genetic protective variants. This is why the University of Maryland School of Medicine has operated an Amish Research Clinic in Lancaster for more than 30 years. The Amish are studied by American federal science precisely because their reduced variation in environmental exposures makes them a scientifically valuable comparison population that non-Amish American cohorts cannot match.
They are not an experimental control group. They differ from the general population across genetics, ascertainment, healthcare utilization, education, diet, occupation, and environmental exposures. But because those environmental exposures are more uniform than in the general population, the Amish are a distinctive natural comparison population for childhood neurodevelopmental research — and the scientific value of that comparison depends on the uniformity of exposure holding steady across time.
The Amish are a distinctive natural comparison population for pediatric research. Pennsylvania is running a residential pyrethroid fogging program in overlapping geography during the measles response. The full 2026 spray log has not been published — and the state's own published file is demonstrably incomplete. As of this writing, the Lebanon County Conservation District's mosquito-control page announces a truck-mounted ULV spray in East Hempfield Township, Lancaster Township, and Lancaster City, postponed from September 4 to September 8. That application does not appear in DEP's published 2026 spray notification file, which runs through September 3. The agency's public log does not match the operator's own notice. That is the collision this letter is about.
I am writing this letter to inform you that a specific arm of a specific state government is, right now, in the same weeks in which your post generated national attention to the Amish pediatric health profile, running a residential pyrethroid fogging program whose documented geography overlaps the western edge of the Lancaster Amish settlement, and whose full 2026 township-level spray log has not been made public. The extent to which this program has reached the Amish core townships — East Lampeter, Leacock, Salisbury, Bird-in-Hand, Intercourse, Paradise, Gap, New Holland — is presently unknown, because the records have not been released.
I am asking you to demand those records, and to pause the operation until they are on the public table.
What is happening in Pennsylvania
Governor Josh Shapiro’s administration is conducting three concurrent operations in Lancaster and Lebanon counties — the geographic core of the largest Amish settlement in the United States. Each operation is defensible in isolation. The problem is the convergence.
Operation One: The MMR campaign targeting the Amish community. Since April 2026, Pennsylvania has run 91 pop-up MMR clinics with 40 more planned, administered more than 4,100 MMR doses at those clinics, and vaccinated more than 35,000 Pennsylvanians in July 2026 alone — 10,000 more than a typical month. Pennsylvania Bureau of Immunizations director Tom McCleaf presented the operational blueprint at the Association of Immunization Managers conference on April 15, 2025 in a slide deck titled “Outreach in the Plain Community.” The deck listed “horse and buggy clinics,” “mud sales,” “Amish schoolhouse visits,” and stated in writing that changing vaccination practices in this community could take “over generations.” Those are his words, not mine.
Operation Two: The disputed “measles deaths.” On August 25, 2026, Governor Shapiro announced two “measles-associated deaths” at a press conference held inside Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health’s Women and Babies Hospital. Within hours, political operations issued statements accusing you and Secretary Kennedy of having “blood on your hands”. The Lancaster County Coroner, Dr. Stephen Diamantoni, subsequently told local media his office had handled “no measles deaths”; the one infant death that reached his office was ruled a splenic laceration in which measles antibodies were merely present postmortem. Pennsylvania acknowledged it uses the term “measles-associated” when laboratory evidence of measles exists even if measles was not the cause of death. The state has produced no evidence that measles caused either death.
The political attack lines used against you within hours of the announcement were poll-tested a week before anyone died. Public Policy Polling surveyed 525 registered voters on August 17–18, 2026 on behalf of Protect Our Care and 314 Action. The poll validated four attack messages, including one that dropped Republican favorability by 61% by tying autism, RFK Jr., and vaccine skepticism together. Six days later, the pre-written message deployed on schedule. The message was built. It needed a trigger.
Operation Three — the operation the country has not yet noticed. This is why I am writing you. In overlapping geography, in the same weeks, the Lancaster/Lebanon Mosquito-Borne Disease Program (housed at the Lebanon County Conservation District, operating under state authority) is conducting residential ultra-low-volume truck-fogging with AquaDuet, a synthetic pyrethroid formulation containing prallethrin, sumithrin (d-phenothrin), and the synergist piperonyl butoxide, at a documented application rate of 1 oz per acre. The City of Lancaster’s own public notices confirm the program’s residential character and instruct residents in the immediate spray vicinity to remain indoors during application.
The documented geography reaches the western edge of the Lancaster Amish settlement. The full 2026 township-level spray log — every date, every route, every product, every application rate, every vector-index trigger value — has not been published. Whether the Amish core townships (East Lampeter, Leacock, Salisbury, Bird-in-Hand, Intercourse, Paradise, Gap, New Holland) have been included in, notified about, or excluded from the 2026 route table is presently unknown outside the agencies that hold those records.
Pyrethroids act on neuronal voltage-gated sodium channels; that is why they kill mosquitoes, and it is why the same chemical class is classified as neuroactive in EPA registration data. Piperonyl butoxide is a metabolic synergist that suppresses the cytochrome P450 detoxification pathways children rely on to clear the pyrethroid itself. Hazard at the chemical-class level is not the same thing as risk at the application dose, and I do not claim otherwise in this letter. What I claim is more modest and much harder to dismiss: residential application of a neuroactive chemical class in a community that is simultaneously the subject of an intensive pediatric public-health intervention warrants published documentation of the co-exposure analysis, and Pennsylvania has not produced one.
What the peer-reviewed literature says about developmental pyrethroid exposure
Every claim below is peer-reviewed. Every one is primary source. None of them, individually or collectively, establish that any specific Pennsylvania application caused any specific outcome. What they establish is the population-level risk profile that makes published co-exposure documentation the ordinary standard of care.
The Shelton CHARGE study (Environmental Health Perspectives, 2014) reported that prenatal residential proximity within 1.5 km of pyrethroid application in the third trimester was associated with autism spectrum disorder at an odds ratio of 1.87 (Shelton et al., 2014).
The von Ehrenstein BMJ replication (2019) reported that maternal residential exposure to permethrin during pregnancy was associated with ASD at an odds ratio of 1.10 with a confidence interval not crossing the null (von Ehrenstein et al., 2019).
The Ni 2022 meta-analysis pooled available pyrethroid-ASD studies and reported a pooled odds ratio of 1.40 (95% CI 1.09–1.80) for prenatal pyrethroid exposure and autism spectrum disorder (Ni et al., 2022).
The Andersen 2022 systematic review — a formal weight-of-evidence assessment — concluded that there is “sufficient evidence” that prenatal pyrethroid exposure is associated with adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes (Andersen et al., 2022).
The Horton 2011 Columbia study reported that highest-quartile prenatal exposure to piperonyl butoxide — the synergist in AquaDuet — was associated with delayed mental development at 36 months at an odds ratio of 4.47 (Horton et al., 2011).
The 2015 European burden-of-disease estimate attributed approximately 18% of ADHD cases in the studied European population to organophosphate and pyrethroid exposure combined (Bellanger et al., 2015).
Mouse-model studies of deltamethrin administered at doses below the EPA benchmark dose during developmental windows have produced autism-like behavioral phenotypes (Richardson et al., 2015, FASEB Journal).
What this collectively establishes is that the chemical class Pennsylvania is applying in residential geography overlapping the western edge of the Lancaster Amish settlement is a chemical class the peer-reviewed literature associates with the neurodevelopmental outcomes your post surfaced — sufficient to require the state to publish its pediatric co-exposure analysis, and, if no such analysis exists, sufficient to require the federal government to ask why not.
Why this is politically charged, and why that must not stop you from acting
Mr. President, you already understand the political architecture around this issue better than most of the people writing about it. The August 25 Shapiro press conference was not just a public-health event. It was also a political event. Two political organizations had already spent a week poll-testing which anti-Republican attack line would land hardest — and the message that scored highest was the one that linked measles, autism, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. together. The trigger arrived; the pre-tested message deployed on schedule. Within hours you had “blood on your hands.” Within days the coroner said no measles deaths had crossed his desk.
I am not asserting that the mosquito-control program was designed to target the Amish. My underlying investigation avoids that inference, and this letter preserves it. What I am asserting is documented: Pennsylvania is running multiple operations that intersect the Lancaster Plain-community landscape. The MMR outreach expressly targets Plain communities. The mosquito-control operation does not appear to target the Amish, but its documented residential geography intersects the western edge of the settlement, and its full 2026 route into the eastern core townships has not been published. And a disputed public-health emergency declaration on August 25 was followed within hours by pre-scripted political messaging. The four companion investigations document a pattern in which the instruments of state authority converge on this landscape across multiple domains in the same operational window.
If Pennsylvania continues residential pyrethroid fogging for the balance of the mosquito season without publishing its full 2026 township-level spray log, trigger thresholds, Amish-community notification and exclusion protocol, and pediatric co-exposure analysis (if any exists), future researchers attempting to interpret longitudinal neurodevelopmental trends in this population face an avoidable exposure-confounding problem — unless the geography and timing of these applications are documented now.
The damage to the scientific record is not hypothetical. It is what happens by default when concurrent environmental interventions in a reference population are not documented in real time. It is what already happened once with the 2010 IMFAR data — collected on 1,899 Amish children, never published in stratified form, and still not published sixteen years later. The window to prevent that pattern from repeating is now, not later.
The pyrethroid fog is not itself the political attack. But the missing spray log is the missing evidence — the evidence a competent scientific record of this outbreak response requires, and the evidence the state has not produced.
What I am asking you to do
Six specific actions. Each is within the executive authority of the office you hold or the agencies you appoint. Note that every action below is framed as a records demand, a review, or a protocol — not as a preemptive finding. The point is to get the evidence on the public table, not to assume its content.
One. Federal Right-to-Know demand.
Direct HHS and EPA general counsel to formally request from Pennsylvania DEP, PA DOH, and Lancaster/Lebanon County the complete 2026 pyrethroid spray log — every date, every township, every route, every product, every application rate, every vector-index trigger value, every complaint received, every notification issued to Plain-community leadership, and any pediatric co-exposure analysis that authorized concurrent operation with the MMR campaign. Pennsylvania Right-to-Know Law requests are being filed today by independent journalists and citizens. The federal government has independent authority to make its own demand, and should. The extent of overlap between the fogging program and the Amish settlement is a factual question that can be settled by these records.
Two. HHS site visit.
Direct Secretary Kennedy to send an HHS delegation — including CDC Division of Vector-Borne Diseases and NIEHS environmental health scientists — to Lancaster and Lebanon counties this week, to observe the ongoing residential ULV fogging operation, document the actual drift envelopes, meet with Plain-community bishops through appropriate liaisons, and produce a public report within thirty days.
Three. EPA co-exposure review.
Direct the EPA Administrator to state, on the federal record, whether Pennsylvania DEP’s repeated public representation that AquaDuet “is not harmful to humans or animals” is consistent with the EPA-approved label for EPA Reg. No. 1021-2562-8329.
That label carries the signal word CAUTION. It requires mixers, loaders, applicators and other handlers to wear long-sleeved shirts, long pants, shoes and socks. Under Environmental Hazards it states that the product is highly toxic to aquatic organisms, including fish and aquatic invertebrates, and highly toxic to bees exposed to direct treatment on blooming crops or weeds. Fish and bees are animals.
DEP has published the “not harmful to humans or animals” sentence verbatim in multiple 2026 spray notices, including Delaware County on July 15 and Lycoming County on August 14. EPA’s own standard for registered mosquito adulticides is that they pose no unreasonable risk when applied according to label directions — which is a different and narrower claim than categorical harmlessness.
This is a federal question about a federally approved label. It requires no cooperation from any state agency to answer, and it can be answered from documents EPA already holds.
Four. CDC environmental co-exposure protocol.
Direct CDC to publish an environmental co-exposure protocol for measles outbreak investigations in agricultural and Plain communities, requiring investigators to document pesticide exposure in the 30 days prior to symptom onset for every laboratory-positive case, and to conduct differential diagnosis for rash-plus-nonspecific-systemic-symptoms presentations that includes recent MMR reaction and pyrethroid exposure. Standard measles PCR cannot, by itself, distinguish MMR vaccine strain from wild-type virus in a recently-vaccinated person; the state of Pennsylvania has never publicly documented how it excluded either alternative.
Five. Amish research protection.
Direct NIH to formally recognize the Amish population as a scientifically valuable natural comparison cohort for pediatric research, and to require federal review and comment before any state-level chemical intervention program operates within the geographic footprint of a federally-funded Amish cohort study without prior published co-exposure documentation. The Amish Protective Variant Study, the Amish Research Clinic at UMSOM, and the Amish Complex Disease Research Program are direct federal scientific assets. They deserve federal scientific protection.
Six. Constitutional review.
Direct the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division to open a preliminary inquiry into whether Pennsylvania’s concurrent operations against the Plain community — the multi-generational MMR persuasion campaign, the disputed “measles death” declaration, the residential pyrethroid fogging without published spray logs or accessible hypersensitivity protections, and the January 2024 armed raid on Amos Miller’s farm — collectively raise concerns under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act sufficient to warrant a federal review.
None of these actions require legislation. Each is within existing executive authority. Each can begin this week.
Why it must be this week
The political pressure on you not to act will be intense — precisely because acting is effective. The apparatus that attacked you on August 25 will attack you again the moment you name the collision publicly. It will accuse you of interfering in a public-health emergency, in language designed for cable news rather than records requests.
Let it. Every action requested in this letter is a records demand or a review, not a preemptive finding. The government cannot credibly attack a President for asking it to publish its own operational data. The missing evidence is the story.
The disclosure gap your critics cannot argue away: Pennsylvania has run a state-linked residential pyrethroid fogging program in the same weeks as an intensive pediatric MMR intervention in overlapping geography, and has not published the full 2026 township-level spray log. That is not an interpretation. It is a documentary state of affairs.
If your administration does not act this week, the geographic operation continues. The exposure profile of the reference population during this window remains undocumented. And two years from now, any researcher attempting to reason from that data to any environmental inference will confront a hole in the record that could have been filled by a records demand made today.
You brought the country’s attention to this population. Demand the records that would let the country understand what has actually happened to them.
Respectfully,
Sayer Ji,
Founder of Greenmedinfo.com
Senior Advisor, MAHA Action
Co-founder of Stand For Health Freedom
Chair, Global Wellness Forum
UPDATE, September 3, 2026: The records requests are filed. The clock is running.
The Right-to-Know Law requests this letter describes as being filed were filed on September 2, 2026 under 65 P.S. § 67.101, with the Lancaster County Conservation District and the Lebanon County Conservation District, the two agencies that operate the residential fogging program. Both filings are public: Lancaster County | Lebanon County
Every event described in this letter is now dated, source-cited, and open to public dispute on a live investigative record: pa-2026-anomaly.pages.dev
What the county filings reach, and what they do not. The two requests cover the county half of Action One: the district-held 2026 route tables, the notification records, the complaint files. They do not reach Pennsylvania DEP. They do not reach PA DOH. They do not reach any pediatric co-exposure analysis held at state level, which is the single document that would show whether anyone assessed the two programs running in parallel before they were run in parallel. Citizens have now done the part citizens can do. The rest of Action One requires the federal demand this letter asks for, and nothing has changed about who can make it.
Every path from here is on the record. Full production puts the 2026 spray events, the Plain-community notification protocol, the district communications with community liaisons, and the complaint record into the public domain for the first time. A § 902(b) extension, a partial production, a denial, or silence is itself a formal state action, and a denial opens a fifteen-business-day appeal at the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records.
The asks in this letter are unchanged. The evidentiary tiers at the foot of it are unchanged. What has changed is that the second tier now has a deadline attached to it.
Supporting investigations referenced in this letter
“Pennsylvania Is Executing the Most Aggressive State Vaccination Operation Against a Religious Minority in Modern American History” — the operational documentation of the multi-generational MMR campaign, the disputed measles deaths, and the January 2024 Amos Miller raid.
“The Amish Are Being Targeted in Two States. Pennsylvania Calls It Outreach. New York Calls It Enforcement.” — the two-tier institutional network operating against the same community, from voluntary “buggy clinics” to $118,000 in fines against three one-room Amish schools.
“EXCLUSIVE: The ‘Measles Death’ Message Was Loaded a Week Before Pennsylvania Announced Any Deaths” — the poll-tested political operation that deployed within hours of the August 25 press conference for deaths the state has never shown measles caused.
“Trump Just Pointed at the Low Autism Rates in Unvaccinated Amish. Here’s the Study They Buried and the Cohort They’re Erasing.” — the primary documentary investigation of the 2010 IMFAR Paper 7336 (Robinson, Nations, Suslowitz, Cuccaro, Haines, Pericak-Vance) that fact-checkers rely on to bound the Amish autism prevalence estimate. The study screened 1,899 Amish children, confirmed 7 ASD cases, and collected a complete vaccination history on every child screened. The vaccination-stratified analysis has never been published. An audit of fourteen mainstream fact-checks found zero mentions of the vaccination-history sentence and zero questions about what happened to the collected data. This is the disclosure-gap precedent the current Pennsylvania spray-log gap is on track to reproduce.
“EXCLUSIVE: They Are Spraying Neurotoxins Over the Outbreak Amish Counties in PA” — the primary investigation documenting Pennsylvania’s residential ULV pyrethroid fogging program, the AquaDuet application data, the documented drift envelope reaching the western edge of the Lancaster Amish settlement, and the eight questions the state has not answered. Right-to-Know Law requests are being filed today, September 2, 2026, under 65 P.S. § 67.101. The five-day statutory clock starts tomorrow.
A note on evidentiary scope. This letter draws a careful three-level distinction, which I ask every reader — supporter or critic — to preserve.
Documented. Pennsylvania is conducting a major measles/MMR response involving Plain communities; a state-linked mosquito-control program uses AquaDuet ULV fogging in Lancaster/Lebanon at 1 oz/acre; the documented residential geography reaches the western edge of the Lancaster Amish settlement; pyrethroids have recognized neuroactive mechanisms; and epidemiological literature warrants serious investigation of developmental exposure.
Not yet documented. The complete 2026 Lancaster/Lebanon application geography, dates, routes, application rates by township, degree of overlap with Amish residences, MMR clinic sites, and individual measles cases.
Not established. That fogging caused any measles case, any measles-like illness, any autism diagnosis, or either of the two announced deaths; or that the mosquito-control program was intentionally directed at the Amish because of their epidemiological significance.
This letter is grounded in the first tier, asks for the records that would settle the second, and does not assert the third. It also does not assert that any pyrethroid application has reached the Amish settlement itself. On the published record, the documented 2026 Lancaster–Lebanon application was in North and South Londonderry Townships, Lebanon County, roughly forty kilometers from the eastern Amish core. Whether the unpublished portion of the log shows otherwise is precisely the question.
This letter is being sent to the White House Correspondence Office, the Office of the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Office of the EPA Administrator, and the Office of the CDC Director. It is being published simultaneously at sayerji.substack.com and released to national press. Every federal response, every acknowledgment, and every silence will be reported.
Bless you Sayer Ji and the whole team! 🙏🏼
Thank you. Very thorough. I hope the silence from their response isn’t deafening…..It is all insane….