Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. blasted Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro for accusing him of spreading vaccine misinformation, saying the Democrat governor could not cite a single example when confronted and later “gaslighted” the public.

The war of words came Tuesday after Shapiro announced that two unvaccinated people in Pennsylvania had died from measles and accused Kennedy and the Trump administration of “scaring people” away from trusting doctors and vaccines.

Kennedy said Shapiro made the same accusation during a phone call between the two but came up empty when pressed for evidence.

“During our phone conversation, Governor Shapiro also accused me of promoting vaccine misinformation,” Kennedy wrote on X. “When I asked him for an example, he was unable to provide one, but this did not deter him from publicly repeating that accusation during his press event.”

Kennedy said he told Shapiro that HHS does not tolerate misinformation and offered to show him “hundreds of instances” of what Kennedy described as vaccine misinformation under the Biden administration.

During a Tuesday media briefing, Shapiro said Kennedy had called to offer federal resources to help Pennsylvania respond to the measles outbreak. The governor said he rejected the offer and instead confronted Kennedy over his rhetoric.

“I was very, very blunt with him, and I made very clear that his actions and the rhetoric that’s coming from this administration are having a negative impact on communities across America, particularly right here in Pennsylvania,” Shapiro said, according to the Washington Examiner.

“There’s real-life consequences to scaring people and not relying on actual doctors and actual medical professionals to provide unbiased information to parents so that we can make reasonable decisions for our kids,” he continued.

Shapiro also accused Kennedy of “sharing conspiracy theories and misinformation,” a charge the HHS secretary disputed.

Kennedy said the two clashed during their conversation over the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine.

“At his press conference today, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro accused me of promoting conspiracy theories because I told him, during an earlier telephone conversation, that some Americans had religious objections to the MMR vaccine because it contained fetal tissue. ‘There is no fetal tissue in the MMR,’ he told me,” Kennedy wrote.

Kennedy pointed to a deposition from Dr. Stanley Plotkin, who helped develop the rubella vaccine, concerning cell-substrate DNA in MMR II.

“Dr. Plotkin answered: ‘Yeah, that’s probably correct, yes,'” Kennedy wrote.

Kennedy also challenged Shapiro’s attempt to tie him to Pennsylvania’s declining vaccination rate, saying the governor acknowledged that most of the drop occurred before Kennedy took charge of HHS.

“Governor Shapiro also faulted me for the decline in Pennsylvania vaccination rates from 97% – 93.2%,” Kennedy wrote. “When I pushed back on this assertion, he acknowledged that most of the decline occurred during the Biden administration.

“It’s unfortunately true that the government lockdowns, deceptions, manipulation, and overreach during COVID severely damaged public faith in the vaccine program,” he added.