How measles tore through a remote West Texas city

Yahoo

2 days ago

SEMINOLE, Texas — On a Saturday in mid-March, Dr. Ben Edwards put on his scrubs and drove to a sheet metal building in this tiny West Texas city to treat children with measles. Red spots mottled his face; Edwards was sick with measles, too.
An outbreak of the disease was swelling in Gaines County, a rural community with one of the lowest childhood vaccination rates in the country. For two weeks, lines of families had snaked around the building's dusty parking lot, almost all belonging to the area's Mennonite community, a religious group known to speak Low German and keep to themselves, mostly sending their children to church-run schools. The parents were concerned by the illness that had speckled their children's bodies and weakened their breathing, but their distrust of vaccines and hospitals ran deeper. Edwards' alternatives seemed a safer bet.
Hastily repurposed from general store to clinic, the space Edwards worked in held little besides folding tables, plastic chairs and boxes of vitamins and supplements flown in by private plane. Feverish children coughed and whimpered. A flushed baby lay in his mother's arms. Another child curled under a blanket on her mother's lap. A crew from the anti-vaccine group Children's Health Defense documented it all.
Edwards handed out cod liver oil — pungent liquids and pills rich in vitamins A and D — and prescribed steroid inhalers. Neither treatment can prevent or cure measles, and medical associations have warned against them; Edwards said he had seen the therapies 'work beautifully.'
'They had nowhere else to turn,' Edwards said later on his podcast, defending his decision to run the children's clinic while he was contagious.
But down the road at Seminole's only hospital, a waiting room made for measles patients often sat empty. And even as infections soared, there was little demand for the only proven way of preventing them: On a recent weekday, just four people had come by the county's free vaccine clinic.So two responses were in motion to deal with an extremely contagious disease that threatens small children the most. One was grounded in science and evidence, led by overwhelmed public health officials. The other was driven by distrust and propaganda — spread by anti-vaccine activists and alternative practitioners like Edwards, and, for the first time in memory, backed by the federal government itself under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
As founder, chairman and chief counsel of the nonprofit Children's Health Defense, Kennedy had spent two decades building the modern anti-vaccine movement. Now, as health secretary, he was downplaying the dangers of measles, spreading falsehoods about the risk of vaccines and urging parents to 'do your own research.'
Kennedy broadcast these messages as the worst measles outbreak since the 1990s flared in one of the most vulnerable places — an isolated Mennonite community already skeptical of outsiders, primed to resist government intervention and influenced by misinformation that Kennedy had helped mainstream. In a matter of weeks, an illness once eradicated in the United States would burn through Gaines County's unvaccinated, hospitalizing scores of children and leaving two little girls dead.
During the surge, the anti-vaccine movement came to town and turned Seminole into a front line in an information war — fought by fringe doctors, anti-vaccine activists and politicians pushing unproven cures, false hope and a narrative that shifted the blame back to conventional medicine once the costs of vaccine refusal became devastatingly clear.
The story of Seminole — based on dozens of interviews, podcasts and news reports and descriptions from public health officials, Mennonite residents, traditional and alternative doctors and anti-vaccine organizations — offers a look behind the battle lines, as well as a warning for a country increasingly fractured not just by politics, but by competing realities.
Sick children began showing up at Texas hospitals in January.
Dr. Leila Myrick was on call when the first child landed in Seminole's emergency room, where she consulted a medical textbook to confirm measles, a disease she had never actually seen.
Myrick had moved her family from Atlanta to Seminole in 2020, drawn by the promise of small-town medicine in a city cut out of the desert, a conservative but diverse community where many of her patients were Mennonite and Latino. She had taken care of their families in the five years since — through Covid and baby deliveries and everything in between. A framed poster of Myrick cradling newborns hangs in the hallway outside her office.
Measles now threatened these children, and Myrick did what she could to persuade parents to vaccinate them. She gave interviews, answered calls on a local German-language radio show, stayed late at her clinic and worked weekends at the hospital.
But her message faced competition.
Children's Health Defense, the country's largest anti-vaccine nonprofit, has downplayed the danger of measles for decades, falsely calling it benign and beneficial to the immune system. Seminole's outbreak didn't deter the group, which wrongly suggested it had been caused by a local vaccination campaign and then floated other contradictory theories: that the vaccines were failing, shedding the measles virus, or perhaps working too well, leading somehow to a super virulent strain.
Myrick watched her neighbors repeat these distortions in a local Facebook group, 'Seminole TX Residents NEED to KNOW,' sometimes naming her directly.
'Every doctor that pushes the jabs gets commission from the big Pharma,' one woman wrote.
In late February, the Gaines County library posted a flyer 'kindly' asking that unvaccinated and measles-sick patrons not come in. By the evening, after an outcry in the comments, the library removed the post.
'I see a vulnerable population getting fed the wrong information and making decisions for their children's health based on wrong information,' Myrick said. 'And I feel helpless.'
Responsibility for managing the outbreak fell on Zach Holbrooks, executive director of the South Plains Public Health District.
Holbrooks grew up in Seminole and after stints in Lubbock and Austin moved back in 2008 to lead public health across four counties. Run on about $2 million in grants a year, the health department's responsibilities are broad — vaccines and family planning, but also disaster response, fire protection, food safety, landfills, inspections, permits and more.
Holbrooks didn't see measles coming, though he is quick to say he probably should have — vaccine exemptions in Gaines County had more than doubled in the last 10 years, and about 1 in 5 kindergarteners were now skipping the shots.
When the first cases were confirmed at the end of January, 'my heart sank,' Holbrooks said.
The district kept only a couple of doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines on hand — enough for new families moving into the area, not to meet the sudden need of an outbreak. The two epidemiologists Holbrooks had on staff were immediately overwhelmed by case investigations. Holbrooks also didn't have outreach materials in Low German or a relationship with the Mennonite community, which he now urgently needed a way into.
He turned to the state, which brought in nurses, testing supplies and vaccines. He set up a vaccine and testing clinic outside Seminole Hospital District; a spray-painted arrow on unfinished plywood signaled where to go.
Billie Dean, a nurse and site leader at the clinic, remembered one Mennonite woman who drove by every day in a compact gold car.
'We would see her pull in, and we were like, 'Oh, she's back,'' Dean said. Each day, they told her how many people had gotten vaccinated the day before, how none had come back with side effects. After two weeks, she rolled down her window and said she was ready. A few days later, she came back with her daughter and grandson.
Holbrooks printed flyers in English, Spanish and, with the assistance of a local author, Low German, to distribute at grocery stores, libraries, post offices and churches, and he gave updates on the local TV and radio stations.
Still, cases in the area ticked up, nearly doubling in a week to 80, a sure undercount, since officials knew many people weren't being tested. In a letter published in February in The Mennonite Post, a German-language newspaper, a married Seminole couple reported 'a lot of sick people here. Many have fever or diarrhea, vomiting or measles.'
Epidemiology deals in numbers. With measles, they go like this: With 1,000 cases, about 200 children will require hospitalization, 50 will develop pneumonia, and one to three will die.
The numbers caught up to Seminole on Feb. 26.
Kayley Fehr was 6 years old. She had two brothers and two sisters and, according to her obituary, she loved to sing and make people laugh. She was unvaccinated.
Kayley got measles around the same time as her four siblings. As her fever rose, she struggled to breathe and became tired. The doctor gave her Tylenol and something for her cough, but she was still unable to catch her breath and couldn't eat because of the sores in her mouth.
Kayley's parents took her to Covenant Children's Hospital in Lubbock, where she was diagnosed with pneumonia and admitted to the intensive care unit. Kayley deteriorated quickly. Her final hours were spent too weak to speak, her breathing shallow, her mouth sticky from thirst. She was sedated, intubated and placed on a ventilator.
The details surrounding Kayley's death came weeks later when her parents sat for an interview with Children's Health Defense. Speaking through an interpreter and tears, they shared the story of their loss.
That interview solidified a shifting narrative. After Kayley's death, Children's Health Defense pivoted to a frame that the group had sharpened during previous outbreaks and perfected with Covid: that Kayley had died with measles, not from it; that the virus was incidental and some other ailment or failure had killed her. To communicate that story, the activists needed someone with more authority. They needed a doctor.
Ben Edwards practiced conventional family medicine in a small-town clinic in Post, Texas, but around 2013, as he tells it, he grew disillusioned, awed by an Amarillo holistic practitioner who denied the power of germs and preached the outdated theory of terrains: that the body's constitution determines whether a sickness takes hold.
Edwards' new guru, who had lost his medical license and who the Texas Medical Board called a 'threat to the public welfare,' sold nutrition, supplements and lifestyle coaching — and some unorthodox and unproven interventions, such as ketamine to 'cure' autism. When Edwards tried to implement what he was learning, he was fired from his county clinic — now free, as he saw it, to strike out on his own.
More than a decade later, Edwards has a sleek cash-only clinic in downtown Lubbock with a small waterfall outside the lobby, a lounge for IV treatments and a studio where he hosts his podcast, 'You're the Cure.'
Kayley's death set off a series of events that brought Edwards — and later Children's Health Defense — to Seminole.
At the end of February, Edwards got a call from Tina Siemens, one of his earliest patients, who often describes herself as 'the bridge' between Seminole's Mennonites and the outside world. Siemens, who runs a small museum of local Mennonite history, had helped local officials translate materials on vaccination and testing into Low German. Now, she told Edwards that Kayley's parents were worried about their other children, who were still sick with measles.
Edwards met the family at Kayley's viewing on March 1, where he gave them cod liver oil and a prescription for budesonide, a steroid inhaler that's mostly used for asthma. Edwards had gotten the idea from Richard Bartlett, a devout Christian and emergency medicine doctor in Odessa, who said he discovered the steroid as a 'silver bullet' against Covid after being divinely inspired during a nap. (Research on its efficacy is mixed.)
The next morning, Edwards wondered: What if he could treat everybody?
He ordered 1,000 bottles of cod liver oil and vitamin C from his supplier, and a pilot — also a patient of Edwards — flew to Scottsdale, Arizona, to pick them up. Volunteers back in Seminole unloaded the boxes of capsules and liquids in the empty space next to a Mennonite-owned shop, Health-2-U. By the afternoon, people had brought in tables and chairs, making a waiting room on one side and a clinic on the other.
Children's Health Defense launched a fundraiser, taking in more than $16,000 to 'defray the cost of essential vitamins, supplements and medicines necessary to treat children enduring complications from the measles.'
About 70 kids came through the first day by Edwards' count. Some were already sick — with fevers that wouldn't break and coughs that lingered. Others were just beginning to show symptoms. Edwards returned to his pop-up clinic the next day. Another packed room waited for him.
The story of the Lubbock doctor helping kids for free spread fast. Asked about his newfound popularity among the Mennonites, Edwards began to cry.
'It makes me real sad,' Edwards said in a phone interview in March. 'Why am I the only doctor out there treating these kids?'
Meanwhile, Edwards urged his friend Bartlett, the doctor who advocated for budesonide, to go to Covenant Children's Hospital to intervene in the most serious cases. Wearing his white doctor's coat, Bartlett met the parents of one sick child as she lay in the pediatric ICU. Announcing himself as a 'friend of the family' — a term he later said on his podcast he used to gain access to the secure floor — he pulled Covenant's attending doctor aside. Bartlett said that budesonide had saved Covid patients and it would work now. According to Bartlett, the doctor relented and added the treatment, because the parents wanted it. Bartlett then went to another pediatric ICU room.
'The same doctor looked at me,' Bartlett said. 'He was ticked. He said, 'You again?''
Covenant Children's Hospital viewed Bartlett's intervention as interfering with care. The hospital issued a trespass warning and put a photo of Bartlett in the security office.
Children's Health Defense glowingly covered Edwards' makeshift clinic, and Kennedy spoke directly to the doctor, praising his treatments on Fox News as producing 'very, very good results.'
The following week, Children's Health Defense landed in Seminole and turned the crisis into content. Led by Polly Tommey — a self-described autism mom and co-creator of the anti-vaccine 'Vaxxed' films — they drove in from Austin through dust storms, 'to see for ourselves what was going on.'
A group of Mennonite parents, including Kayley's, gathered to tell their stories of vaccines and measles on camera. They described a boy who developed seizures after an MMR shot when he was a baby in Mexico; a teenage girl with exhausting tics and limb pain caused by childhood vaccines; a mother whose church raised money for a stem cell transplant in China to undo the vaccine damage that had left her son in a wheelchair. These stories — compelling and unverifiable — were the kind Children's Health Defense had used to raise more than $67 million over the last decade.
Siemens, who had brought Edwards in to treat Kayley's siblings, hosted the taping in her museum of Mennonite history. She described the parents' stories as 'mighty, mighty testimonies,' living warnings passed through the community's families and congregations that led the newest generation of parents to decide that vaccinating their children was too great a risk.
Kayley's parents knew those stories well. They told Tommey that even now, they still wouldn't vaccinate. 'The measles wasn't that bad,' her mother, Eva Fehr, said. The hospital's insufficient care, she implied and Children's Health Defense outright said, was to blame for Kayley's death.
Kayley's parents didn't respond to requests for comment.
After the video featuring them circulated online, Covenant Children's issued a statement saying it contained 'misleading and inaccurate claims.' While the hospital was bound by patient confidentiality, 'What we can say is that our physicians and care teams follow evidence-based protocols and make clinical decisions based on a patient's evolving condition, diagnostic findings, and the best available medical knowledge.'
Children's Health Defense, Tommey and Siemens did not respond to requests for comment. Bartlett declined to comment. Stopped recently on a walk near his clinic, Edwards said he would only speak off the record, but he later responded to several questions in writing.
Doctors and nurses at Covenant Children's who were mourning Kayley — and were still caring for the sickest measles patients — took the claims personally.
'It is exhausting to hear, 'I have my own facts, and I've done my own research, and I don't believe your facts, and I know you're a doctor, but I have different knowledge,'' said Dr. Lara Johnson, the hospital's chief medical officer. 'And I always want to be compassionate and sympathetic to patients, because everyone's trying to do the best for themselves, everyone's trying to make the best decisions that they can.'
The alternatives came with their own complications. Johnson said children with measles turned up at the hospital with liver problems from taking too much vitamin A, one of the supplements promoted by Edwards. In a text, Edwards discounted the idea that any children got sick from cod liver oil. 'I have a suspicion that the alleged vitamin A toxicity diagnosis is very questionable,' he said.
For Johnson, the public mistrust felt like a replay of Covid.
'Everyone's kind of mourning the loss of the way it used to be,' she said.
Kayley's death spurred Texas to ask for federal help. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent a group of epidemiologists to Lubbock, and one of them, Jonathan Yoder, moved into Holbrooks' Seminole office.
Yoder had asked to come. He'd grown up in a conservative Amish Mennonite church. His father, who he says 'got off the farm and went to school,' ran a small environmental health department in the Florida panhandle, fielding calls about septic tanks, rabid animals — whatever came in. Yoder swore he'd never work in public health. He studied psychology and worked as a social worker, but he burned out, and after going back for a master's degree in public health, Yoder ended up at the CDC. For two decades he's traveled to disasters around the globe: Ebola, Covid and Flint, Michigan.
Once in Seminole, Yoder started making calls to pastors, midwives, the county judge, the host of the German-language radio show, the editor of a 50-year-old Mennonite newspaper — anyone with a link to the community. He speaks softly, with a slow, careful cadence. On these calls, he mostly listened. He learned that the Mennonite pastors weren't keen to talk about vaccination from the pulpit and no one wanted a clinic in their church or school.
Mistrust of outsiders generally and governments specifically was woven into the community's history. The conservative Anabaptist group had settled in Gaines County after moving from Mexico in the late 1970s. After pooling their money and pouring millions into bad land deals — which secured acres of farmland but not the rights to the water below it — hundreds of families were told within months that they would be deported.
They pushed back, and their work ethic and faith won over neighbors, the mayor of Seminole, Texas lawmakers and, eventually, Congress, which passed a law in 1980 granting them residency. Fears of being kicked out of the country lingered, though, as did anxiety among undocumented Mennonite families who had come from Mexico more recently.
Yoder knew it would be important, as Lubbock's public health director had written in an email to the state earlier in the year, to 'not go in telling people what to do.'
So Yoder focused on building bridges. In March, he met with John Dueck, a former school superintendent in Paraguay and long-haul truck driver who now edits The Mennonite Post, a bi-monthly newsletter that connects far-flung communities from Bolivia to Canada, where Dueck now lives. Many of the Post's readers live in rural areas — some without internet or cell service — where the paper serves as a lifeline, delivering news of births, deaths and harvests. Dueck travels to gather stories.
On Dueck's trip to Seminole, he couldn't stay with families as he usually did — too many kids were sick. A few weeks later, he published an editorial outlining the facts about measles and vaccination. 'Let's demonstrate our love and care for others by taking steps to prevent the spread of this disease,' he wrote.
Dueck faced criticism, which he said he understood. Many of the people he'd spoken with in Seminole believed newer vaccines were more dangerous. Some told him the Covid pandemic had shown how health authorities might orchestrate a crisis — or even use vaccines to control people's lives.
'They were afraid,' Dueck said.
A little over a month after Kayley, another child died.
Daisy Hildebrand was 8 years old. She had blonde hair and wore glasses. She was the oldest of three children and she loved to play outside. She was unvaccinated.
Daisy was generally healthy but had been feeling bad for weeks. On a family trip to Mexico, her eyes got sore and she had trouble breathing. She was diagnosed with measles and pneumonia. When Daisy was admitted to UMC Health System's hospital in Lubbock, she fought to breathe, was intubated and on April 3, she died.
A cast of fringe doctors associated with Children's Health Defense returned to the playbook, separating the pneumonia from the measles that preceded it, and claiming, once again, that the hospital was at fault. Via webcam this time, Tommey interviewed Daisy's father, Peter Hildebrand, who blamed the hospital for Daisy's death and stood by his choice not to vaccinate. Tommey told him the interview would 'save lives.'
In the weeks that followed, as Hildebrand tried to get measles removed from his daughter's death certificate, he and his wife started getting 'random phone calls, people telling us that we're going to hell for killing our daughter.'
'I love my kids,' he said in a phone interview. 'On top of what I've been dealing with, I don't need that type of bulls---, you know?'
UMC Health declined to comment, citing patient confidentiality.
Hildebrand drew support from a surprising official source: Kennedy, who flew to Seminole to attend Daisy's funeral on April 6, and then publicly shared her name for the first time on X.
It was a stunning departure from public health protocol, in which the deaths of individual patients — especially children — are shared carefully.
Kennedy bucked other norms. The HHS secretary communicated directly with Siemens, who ran the Mennonite history museum, and Edwards, who ran the makeshift clinic. He offered only the faintest endorsement of vaccines — while downplaying their effectiveness and exaggerating their risks. He incorrectly speculated on national television that the girls who died may have been unhealthy or malnourished. He praised Edwards' unproven therapies as 'miraculous.'
Now he was in Seminole: the nation's top health official championing alternative medicine in the midst of a deadly outbreak.
That evening, after Daisy's funeral, Kennedy joined the families for a quiet dinner at Siemens' museum. Edwards and Bartlett, the budesonide advocate, were there. Holbrooks, who led the county's measles response, came too, shaking Kennedy's hand and thanking him for sending Yoder. Kennedy later tweeted photos from the gathering. In the caption, he called Edwards and Bartlett 'extraordinary healers.'
By early May, the outbreak had finally run out of unvaccinated children to infect.
Yoder had packed up and returned to Atlanta. At an empty show barn that still offered drive-through vaccines, it was getting too hot for the pair of nurses who staffed it — and there were few takers left. And the metal building at the center of town showed no trace of Edwards or his treatments. It's now a general store, where traditional Mennonite dresses hang beside bolts of fabric, herbal teas and soft lovies crocheted by the shopkeeper's granddaughter.
'Sigh of relief,' Rob Franklin, editor of the Seminole Sentinel, the long-running semiweekly newspaper, said of its May headline: No New Measles Cases in County.
Franklin said the community was fed up with the outside attention. Everyone just wanted to move on. 'They got tired of being portrayed like a problem,' he said.
Holbrooks is still working to capture the full toll of the outbreak, collecting data from alternative practitioners. On Friday, following an inquiry from NBC News, Edwards emailed Holbrooks the accounting of his measles patients: 261 cases, nearly all children.
In his office recently, when asked what he's learned over the last few months, Holbrooks paused.
He ticked off the people who helped him — doctors, city judges, epidemiologists, paramedics, school leaders — and seemed to regret the relationships he hadn't been able to cement.
'If it taught me anything, it's just how important it is to build connections before an outbreak,' he said. 'Don't wait.'
Holbrooks recalled a pre-dawn tornado that tore through Seminole in 1982, leveling some homes and businesses and leaving others untouched. One reporter wrote the city looked like it had survived a small war. The recovery effort pulled the town together, Holbrooks remembered.
'You never know when you're going to need your neighbor.'
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com