Amid West Texas Measles Outbreak, Vaccine Resistance Hardens

The Washington Post

11:37 JST, March 6, 2025

SEMINOLE, Texas – When the local hospital warned of a brewing measles outbreak, Kaleigh Brantner urged fellow residents of this rural West Texas community to beware of vaccinating their children.

Two weeks later, her unvaccinated 7-year-old son came home from school with a fever. The telltale rash across his body followed. But his mild symptoms and swift recovery only hardened Brantner’s anti-vaccination convictions, even after an unvaccinated child died of measles at a hospital 80 miles away.

“We’re not going to harm our children or [risk] the potential to harm our children,” she said, “so that we can save yours.”

Texas’s worst measles eruption in three decades has surged to 146 known cases, with the true toll likely much higher, exposing how under-vaccinated communities are unnecessarily vulnerable to one of the world’s most contagious diseases, experts say. The first known victim was 6 and otherwise healthy, according to two individuals with knowledge of the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details that haven’t been publicly released.

The life-threatening outbreak in West Texas starkly illustrates the stakes of slipping immunization rates and the ascension of vaccine skeptics, including Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to the highest levels of the public health establishment.

And it has revealed how fear and the scientifically false claims of the anti-vaccine movement have seeped into communities such as Gaines County, the epicenter of the outbreak, hardening attitudes about vaccines, pro and con, in the face of a dangerous, preventable disease.

Brantner, 34, said she decided not to vaccinate her children after years of her own research and because, she said, her nephew had a severe reaction to the vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. She moved from New Mexico to Texas in part because it’s easier here to claim an exception to school vaccine mandates.

“A cough, runny nose, fever and rash to a healthy child is mild but vaccine adverse reactions are severe!!!” she commented on Jan. 30 on the local hospital’s Facebook post, which described measles symptoms.

Brantner’s son Paxton recovered from measles with little problem, she said, after she fed him organic food and cod liver oil, bathed him in magnesium salts and rubbed him in beef tallow cream infused with lavender. The family took precautions to protect others in the community, such as ordering groceries for pickup and keeping their older son out of school. He developed a measles rash Friday.

Medical experts and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say harm from vaccines is rare and is vastly outweighed by the risk of preventable disease. Two doses of the measles vaccine are 97 percent effective against the virus.

The origins of the outbreak remain unclear. Infections quickly spread within Gaines County’s Mennonite community, a diverse religious sect of thousands, some of whom educate their children at home or at private schools without vaccine mandates.

But the outbreak is no longer concentrated just in that group. It has infected people like the Brantner family, who are not Mennonites, spread across nine West Texas counties and crossed the border into New Mexico.

The outbreak spurred hundreds in the region to vaccinate themselves and their children as the threat of the virus became immediate. But it has made others dig in their heels, arguing that measles is no worse than chicken pox or the flu.

While most children with measles recover, as many as 1 in 20 develop pneumonia, according to the CDC. One in 1,000 experience swelling of the brain, which can leave a child deaf or with an intellectual disability. For every 1,000 children with measles, one or two die.

Still, some living with the outbreak argue that it is a good thing: Girls can grow up and pass antibodies to their children to shore up protection in infancy, while infected children gain lifelong immunity.

But doctors warn that comes at a cost.

“They could have had that same immunity with the vaccine,” said Tammy Camp, a Lubbock pediatrician who oversees doctors who cared for the child who died. “And, unfortunately, there’s a child who paid a very heavy price for that.”

Why this corner of Texas?

Conditions were ripe for a regional measles outbreak in Gaines County.

It has Texas’s third-highest rate of public school children – 13.6 percent – whose parents claim a “conscientious exemption” for at least one vaccine. In one tiny school district, nearly half the students claim an exemption.

In local private schools, officials believe, the unvaccinated rate is also high.

Measles spreads with extraordinary efficiency, hanging in the air for hours even after a carrier leaves a room. That’s why public health experts say a population needs at least a 95 percent vaccination rate to achieve herd immunity.

Measles was eliminated in the United States in 2000 but periodically reemerges, often after an unvaccinated person travels to a country where measles still broadly circulates. There have been recent cases in the Seattle area, New Jersey and Southern California. If vaccination rates are high, it’s like throwing a match into soaked wood; it fizzles out. If it infiltrates a community with pockets of unvaccinated people, it’s like throwing a torch into a parched forest and igniting a wildfire.

Kennedy, a longtime critic of measles shots and other childhood vaccinations, has not urged Americans to get vaccinated, as federal officials did during past measles outbreaks.

In an op-ed published Sunday on the Fox News website, Kennedy called on parents to discuss measles shots with their health-care providers.

“The decision to vaccinate is a personal one,” Kennedy wrote. “Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.”

Because Gaines County has no movie theater, limited health-care options and few big-box stores, people travel to cities more than an hour away for entertainment, shopping and advanced medical care – creating opportunities for the virus to spread through new pockets of unvaccinated people.

Measles outbreaks often link back to tightly knit groups with below-average vaccination rates, even if the majority of the community is immunized. In 2017, measles tore through a Somali community in the Minneapolis area, infecting more than 70. The next year, a measles outbreak in New York City infected more than 600 Orthodox Jews.

Disease detectives are seeing similar conditions among the West Texas Mennonites.

A misunderstood community

The spotlight on Mennonites has bred resentment in the community that they are being unfairly blamed, stereotyped as insular or conflated with subsets of Amish people who eschew modern medicine and technology.

Mennonites, descendants of persecuted European Anabaptists, have roots in the community that stretch back to the 1970s, when hundreds immigrated from Mexico.

Their more than half-dozen churches range from sprawling halls where hundreds pack the pews and services are live-streamed to tiny buildings on the outskirts of town.

Some are recognized as people who speak Low German or as women who wear head coverings. But many are indistinguishable from other residents. They work as baristas, staff home-style cooking joints and run construction companies, sometimes wearing traditional clothing.

Jake Fehr, pastor of the Mennonite Evangelical Church, who wore jeans and a blazer as he delivered a sermon about the dangers of anger, said Mennonite clergy do not use their pulpits to dissuade parishioners from getting vaccines. People base their decisions on their own convictions, he said, which range from skepticism of Big Pharma to a preference for natural immunity.

“It is not a matter of religion,” said Fehr, who noted that he and his four children are vaccinated. “This gets pushed as a narrative that we are not taking good health protocols and that we are sort of these anti-vaccine people, and that’s just simply not the case.”

He and other local leaders said a Mennonite school and day care deserve credit for temporarily closing after measles exposures, as do parents willing to abide by the 21-day isolation guidance for unvaccinated children who have been exposed to the virus.

Tina Siemens, a local Mennonite historian and author, described the ongoing measles outbreak as just another trial endured by a resilient people.

“It’s not like, ‘Oh we’re so anxious, this is an outbreak, we got to really be scared,’” Siemens said. “You work through it and you learn from your hardships and you get stronger because of it.”

Anti-vaccine views harden

Zach Holbrooks, executive director of the South Plains Public Health District, which includes Gaines County, recently visited Siemens at the museum she runs to share a medical journal article about the four months it took to end a measles outbreak in an Amish community in Ohio in 2014.

Some Mennonites have faulted him for singling out their community, but Holbrooks said he is just trying to provide information about the burgeoning risk.

Holbrooks worries that younger generations do not understand the danger of measles that he and his staff are now seeing. At a testing site outside the hospital, a mother showed up with a baby with blue lips – a sign the infant was struggling to breathe.

“That has haunted me,” Holbrooks said. “That would be the impetus for me to do everything I can to get the message out about measles vaccine.”

Vaccines can be a victim of their own success. When diseases vanish, the memory of their dangers and the urgency to eradicate them fade.

Marina Tovar brought her 15-month-old daughter Kambrey to be vaccinated at the Lubbock Health Department after Sunday church services. She had already planned to vaccinate her daughter when the family’s insurance plan restarted, but sped up her plans after reading about the outbreak.

“Why would I chance her getting it?” Tovar asked, noting that her two older children received vaccines. “And they’ve been fine. So we just wanted to keep her protected the best we could.”

But firsthand experience does not always change views on vaccines.

On a morning last week at a Mennonite-owned pizzeria, a Mennonite couple told a waitress that their 16-year-old son’s recent bout of measles was minor. “It was a rough couple of days, but nothing worse than a flu,” the father, Peter, said.

In an interview, the couple said they view childhood vaccination as tantamount to Russian roulette because of the risk of side effects. They spoke on the condition that their last names not be published because, they said, local Mennonites have been harassed and ostracized since the outbreak began.

The couple said those who choose not to vaccinate children are unfairly vilified. They said they protected the community by keeping their son and his older siblings home after he tested positive for measles.

“Some people have it really bad but most people don’t, just like with the vaccine,” said Mary, the mother. “Where there is risk, there should be choice.”

Experts say the choice not to immunize has consequences for the community, even when people experience mild illness and isolate once sick. People infected with measles can transmit the virus four days before the rash appears. Infants are too young to be vaccinated.

Still, some here believe the vaccines themselves are responsible for the rapid spread of the virus. They repeated false claims from anti-vaccine activists outside Texas who blamed free vaccine clinics launched in the early days of the outbreak for accelerating infections.

They have seized on a handful of measles cases in vaccinated patients (five out of 146, with vaccination status unknown for 62, according to state data) to argue that the unvaccinated are not to blame. But epidemiologists say it’s not surprising that occasional infections will occur among vaccinated people when an outbreak is rapidly growing.

Ben Edwards, a physician in Lubbock who treats some patients in Seminole, including a family with measles, recently released an episode of his podcast about the outbreak, in which he described mass infection as “God’s version of measles immunization.”

Edwards said the ideal treatment for measles is not all that dissimilar from other infectious diseases. His advice for patients is to undergo a “mitochondrial tune-up” to strengthen their immune response.

“Go get a green juice, or just drink some water with a pinch of sea salt and go sit outside and listen to a bird chirp,” Edwards said. “It sounds crazy, but it’s the basics. It’s what our ancestors knew.”

His views stand in stark contrast with the pleas of those on the front lines of the outbreak to get vaccinated. All 20 confirmed measles patients treated at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock were unvaccinated, officials said.

Summer Davies, a pediatric hospitalist, has cared for about half of them, including the one who died.

“This is a disease they didn’t have to get if they had adequate vaccination or if we had adequate herd immunity,” Davies said. “Knowing there was a way to prevent it is the heartbreaking part.”