Next to the Reinland Mennonite Church on the outskirts of Seminole in Texas is a plain grass field surrounded by a chain- link fence that serves as the devout congregation’s graveyard.
‘Absolutely no decorations of any kind,’ reads a notice fixed to the fence, written in English and German.
The Mennonites are, like the Amish, a radical Anabaptist Protestant sect that traces its origins to 17th-century northern Europe. They believe in simplicity and modesty, not to mention a hands-off approach to some of the trappings of the modern world. Including medicine.
This cemetery is certainly modest. There are no flowers, written messages or teddy bears, just plain headstones on a pair of freshly dug graves, even though they belong to two little girls who died in the most tragic circumstances. The fate of these children, aged six and eight, has sent shockwaves across the US because they died of measles, a disease that the authorities announced it had eliminated in 2000.
One of the world’s most contagious viruses, measles is back with a vengeance and now spreading across the US. So far this year there have been 1,168 cases across the country – with more than 740 of those in Texas. In the past month, cases have also soared in the neighbouring state New Mexico as well as Kansas, Virginia and Michigan. Perhaps more seriously, the crisis is spreading beyond the US. Mexico and Canada (which both officially eliminated the disease many years ago) are battling outbreaks that started in their own Mennonite communities.
In the UK, doctors have also expressed growing concern at low child vaccination rates (falling to just 73 per cent in London) – with measles a particular anxiety. Some 109 cases were confirmed in April and 86 in May – most of them in unvaccinated children aged ten years and under.
The deadly measles eruption comes at a terrifying moment for the US as its health is now in the hands of a notorious opponent of vaccines and advocate of quack medicine.
Eight-year-old Daisy Hildebrand, from Seminole in Texas, is the second child in a decade in the US to die from measles – she had not been vaccinated
Robert F Kennedy Jr (better known as RFK Jr) has pledged to ‘Make America Healthy Again’ by promoting a slew of dubious measures such as drinking raw, unpasteurised milk and has previously promoted wild conspiracy theories about vaccines – including blaming them for autism.
Even as US health secretary, the medically unqualified Kennedy has refused to encourage parents to have their children vaccinated or emphasise that vaccines are safe and effective.
This week, he decided to ‘retire’ all 17 members of a crucial committee that advises the government on vaccination.
In Texas alone, the majority of measles cases have been unvaccinated children, say officials. The epicentre of the epidemic has been the rural town of Seminole, a 7,000-strong community in Gaines County which is home to thousands of vaccine-sceptic Mennonites.
Kayley Fehr, six, who died in February, became the first person in the US to succumb to measles in a decade. Two months later, Daisy Hildebrand, another Seminole schoolgirl, died aged eight.
Aside from these deaths, there have been more than 90 local hospitalisations with measles.
The US has had occasional outbreaks over the years but they have quickly died out for the simple reason that nearly everyone had been vaccinated. Kayley and Daisy had not, however. Members of their parents’ Mennonite sect believe that holistic medicine and natural remedies – in the case of measles, cod liver oil and other sources of vitamin A – provide better protection than anything modern science can offer.
And unluckily for the Mennonites – along with millions of other Americans who have rejected vaccines – their sincerely-held but simple-minded beliefs make them fertile ground for anti-vaccine conspiracists.
US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr with Daisy’s parents, Peter and Eva Hildebrand, and two of their other children – whom Peter insists will still not be given the measles jab
The latter, as I discovered in Seminole, have been successful in getting their hooks into this isolated community – feeding their suspicion and ignorance, replacing science with pseudo-science.
Measles is a respiratory illness, which spreads by airborne particles that can persist for hours after an infected person has left the room. The virus, whose most obvious manifestation is a livid rash that can spread the length of the body, has a 90 per cent infection rate among unvaccinated people.
While most recover, it can lead to pneumonia and even – thanks to a swelling of the brain – to permanent deafness and mental impairment. There were reports of parents throwing ‘measles parties’ in Gaines County in January in the belief that, by catching the virus, their children would develop antibodies to pass to their own offspring. But doctors say mass vaccination – which is 97 per cent effective against measles after two doses – made such risky behaviour unnecessary. ‘Herd immunity’ can be achieved only if 95 per cent of the population is vaccinated, experts warn. Yet in the area around Seminole, the vaccination rate among young children is just 82 per cent.
Even that low figure might be an overestimate as so many Mennonite children don’t appear in government data because they are either home-taught or go to unaccredited private church schools.
In Texas, some 118,000 kindergarten children have been granted ‘vaccine exemptions’ by the state for religious or personal reasons. In Gaines County, an astonishing 18 per cent of children have been exempted, while in one school almost half of kindergarten children aren’t vaccinated for MMR.
Experts have no doubt more children will die. So why have so many wanted to avoid inoculation for their children?
Vaccine scepticism has been spreading since the 1998 publication in The Lancet of claims by British doctor Andrew Wakefield linking the commonly-used measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine with child autism.
That research was later exposed as erroneous and Wakefield as a fraudster – he was struck off the medical register in 2010 – but he spawned a worldwide movement that has proved resilient in conspiracy theory-prone America. The pandemic and all the controversy over Covid-19 vaccines bolstered the ranks of sceptics.
Visiting Seminole in April to ‘comfort’ parents, RFK Jr said vaccines were the ‘most effective way to prevent the spread of measles’, but then said the ‘decision to vaccinate is a personal one’. He also claimed that natural remedies such as cod liver oil and other sources of vitamin A were ‘working’ in treating measles.
Despite ads like these, Seminole has become the epicentre of the US epidemic, as thousands of Mennonite locals believe natural remedies provide better protection
Defiant Seminole resident Aaron Friessen was one of many Mennonites who told Tom Leonard that people should be able to ‘do their own thing’ when it comes to vaccination
Doctors insist there’s no evidence to support this, while a hospital in Lubbock, 81 miles from Seminole, says it is now treating children who have measles and a form of vitamin A toxicity – because they’ve been given harmfully large amounts of it.
Although Texas is particularly prone to measles outbreaks because it is one of the 13 states to grant ‘vaccine exemptions’ experts say measles is spreading further because the US has for years endured low and stagnant funding of public health.
Now stringent cuts to federal spending by the Trump administration have taken billions of dollars away from immunisation programmes for various diseases The serious situation in Seminole is a microcosm of the country-wide battle between medical experts – who insist that vaccination is a crucial tool in protecting public health – and anti-vaxxers, who argue that the jabs are more harmful than the diseases they’re supposed to prevent.
Texan doctors have said that, just like the parents of the two dead girls, vaccine sceptics are waiting until their children are severely ill with measles before taking them to hospital.
The medics who treated Daisy say she had no underlying health conditions but had died of ‘measles pulmonary failure’, meaning her lungs were shutting down.
In a rare interview, however, Peter Hildebrand, a 29-year-old lorry driver and Daisy’s father, disputed this. He told me he was convinced that his daughter did not in fact die from measles and that, even now, he would never have his remaining two children vaccinated. ‘They never tested her for the right stuff,’ he said of Daisy. ‘When they finally did test her, the results came in the day she died and it was too late.’
He wouldn’t elaborate on what he meant by ‘the right stuff’ although he has previously said she should have been treated with budesonide, a steroid prescribed for asthma (vaccine sceptics promote it for treating measles but experts say it doesn’t work).
Hildebrand claimed his brother’s children fell ill when they got their jabs. He also said that, when his sister allowed her son to be vaccinated, the boy’s hormones got ‘completely out of whack’.
Polly Tommey, a British mother of an autistic child, has been one of disgraced Andrew Wakefield’s most loyal supporters
He told me that Daisy had contracted measles a week and a half before she died but that the infection had already cleared up. Health officials dispute all aspects of his account but say patient confidentiality rules bar them from saying more.
As for vaccines, Hildebrand said: ‘There’s too much crap – people get sick from them.’ Measles, he said, ‘don’t kill people, these foolish doctors kill people’. They ‘were the reason why Daisy had to go to heaven so early’.
Hildebrand and the parents of the other dead girl, Peter and Eva Fehr – who also blame medical incompetence and insist their daughter didn’t die of measles – agreed to speak at length to a controversial anti-vaccine organisation called Children’s Health Defense (CHD), which was set up by RFK Jr in 2018. According to CHD, Kayley Fehr died because doctors didn’t give the correct antibiotic for pneumonia, although health officials deny this.
The parents were interviewed by the head of CHD’s programme-making arm Polly Tommey, a British mother of an autistic child who has been one of the disgraced Wakefield’s most loyal supporters. When I interviewed her in 2019, Tommey assured me that Wakefield, who moved to the US in 2001, was no longer regarded as the spiritual leader of the anti- vaxxers but had been replaced by RFK Jr.
Yet Wakefield has been back in the spotlight. In April, he appeared on the podcast of Texan doctor and fellow vaccine critic Ben Edwards, who has described mass infection as ‘God’s version of measles immunisation’.
A Christian physician who gave medical advice to the parents of the dead Seminole children before they went to hospital, Edwards has been accused of fuelling the new measles crisis by handing out free supplies of cod liver oil and other ‘remedies’ for measles at a clinic he set up in the town.
Edwards, who described medicine as ‘educated guessing’, told Wakefield he was ‘so honoured’ to have him on his show.
Wakefield – whose bizarre ‘second act’ in the US has included a romantic relationship with Australian supermodel Elle Macpherson – claimed that ‘more than half’ of the world’s adult population don’t believe vaccines are safe and that ‘people no longer trust public health… they want something different and fortunately in the form of Bobby Kennedy they’ve now got something different’.
He told Edwards ‘to keep up the good work you’re doing in west Texas’. According to Edwards: ‘These Mennonite parents are highly educated. They went and did their research… they’re not dumb, they’re not backward.’
A one year-old gets his MMR vaccine at a clinic in Lubbock, Texas – a state where 118,000 kindergarten children have been granted ‘vaccine exemptions’ on religious or personal grounds
As well as being potentially fatal, measles, which commonly results in an all-over rash (pictured), can cause permanent deafness and mental impairment
Doctors now suspect that Seminole’s measles outbreak began after local Mennonites returned from an international church gathering in the Canadian province of New Brunswick last year.
Church leaders, meanwhile, complain that, just like their ancestors who fled religious persecution in Europe centuries ago, they are now being scapegoated.
Mennonites around Seminole – who retain their ancestors’ Germanic accents despite having never lived in Europe – were at best lukewarm about vaccines and at worst openly hostile.
Aaron Friessen was one of many Mennonites who told me people should be able to ‘do their own thing’ when it came to vaccination, oblivious to the consequences for them and others.
Pausing from repairing an old tractor behind the church where the two girls’ funerals were held, the 48-year-old mechanic said: ‘A lot of us didn’t want to get vaccinated for Covid – the officials kept on pushing it so hard.’
He and other church members made it clear Mennonites don’t like being told what to do by the authorities. They were, he admitted, sceptical about modern medicine although ‘when the scary part comes, they’ll still go to hospital’.
Nancy Ginter, the Mennonite owner of a health food store that has done a roaring trade in cod liver oil, has ten children. She only had the first six vaccinated ‘because, later, I did my own research and I found out what they were made of’. She didn’t exactly say what she believed went into vaccines but another Mennonite mother, who only gave her name as Anna, provided an answer: ‘Aborted foetal cells.’
Even after the deaths of two local children, it’s clear the message about vaccines isn’t getting through in Seminole, where a billboard hangs over the main street advertising free vaccinations six days a week. Emergency clinics established here and in Lubbock report they’re hardly being used.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy about this new measles epidemic is that it was entirely preventable, say health experts.
It’s an assertion that seems lost on bereaved father Peter Hildebrand, who continues to flail around in his anguish, looking for someone else to blame for his daughter’s death.
