SEMINOLE — When Anita Froese’s middle child came down with fatigue, body aches and the tell-tale sign of measles — strawberry-colored spots splattered across her skin — she waited it out. Two days later, her son developed the same symptoms. After a week, the disease finally reached her youngest, who vomited all night as her fever spiked to 104.
Froese never brought her children to a doctor. Instead, she administered cod liver oil, vitamins, tea and broth. She refreshed their cold compresses and ran them epsom salt baths. She brought them to a holistic health center for an IV treatment used for heavy metal poisoning.
Recommended Videos
None of her kids are fully vaccinated against measles. She stopped immunizing her first two as infants after hearing stories about others who had bad reactions to the shots, and she approved no shots for her third. Even as an outbreak ripped through her community, Froese preferred that her children contract measles to build natural immunity because to her, measles was on par with the flu.
“It seemed like this was a disease that had come up now and was this big deal,” said Froese, who was vaccinated as a child. “To me, that wasn’t the case.”
But outside of the West Texas town of 7,000, health experts watched in horror as the once-dormant disease spread like a drop of blood in water across Seminole and the outlying counties, hitting at least three other states and breaching international borders. It killed two children, both Mennonites like Froese. It sickened at least 762 Texans — more than half of whom live in Seminole’s Gaines County — and hospitalized 99 statewide. The West Texas outbreak was the nation’s largest in more than 35 years.
But for the Mennonites at the center of it, the scrutiny was worse than the disease itself. Today, Froese and others say they’re no more likely to get vaccinated, and they’re even less trusting of the government and health officials who they feel targeted them and blamed them for causing the outbreak.
Mennonites questioned why measles forced their religious community into the national spotlight. They didn’t know why TV crews clamored to film them grieving little girls who they believed died from underlying conditions or negligent hospitals rather than measles. They didn’t understand the messages from outsiders demanding they leave the country for exercising their right to not vaccinate.
“You’re looked at as this ignorant people that’s almost fueling this thing, like we’re having measles parties, and that was never the case,” said Pastor Jake Fehr of Mennonite Evangelical Church.
Vaccine hesitancy has been brewing for the last 20 years among Mennonites, a cloistered Christian sect with a historical distrust in government. Pandemic-era mandates brought that to a boil in Seminole’s Mennonite community and across Texas.
The religious group is a microcosm of the distrust in vaccines gripping the state. Twice as many Texas parents exempted their kindergartners from measles vaccines this year compared to five years ago, with Gaines County among the highest at almost 20% of its kindergartners being exempt, compared to the state average of less than 4%. Seminole’s vaccination rate is likely far lower when it includes the Mennonites who are homeschooled.
Among the world’s most infectious diseases, measles causes rash and flu-like symptoms and was for many years rare in the U.S. because of widespread vaccination. Especially in young children, measles can cause complications like blindness, brain swelling and even death. Two doses of the measles vaccine are 97% effective at avoiding the disease, according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Texas health officials declared the outbreak over in August — ending an event Froese thinks was inflated from the start.
“I know of plenty of people that had measles when they were children, and they all survived,” Froese said. “To me, that was a risk I was willing to take.”
As measles tore through his community last winter, John Peters, 54, feared the disease was causing his pallor, ringing ears, body pain and fatigue.
In April, after his Mennonite mettle crumbled against his wife’s demand that he seek help, he finally saw a doctor.
He didn’t have measles. He had leukemia.
Peters got seven blood transfusions in a week, and six more over the next three months. When he returned from a hospital stay in the spring, he regretted high-fiving a blotchy child at the grocery store. He changed his immigration consulting firm to appointment-only and asked clients to wash their hands and stay home if they had been around sick people.
“I had zero immunity,” he said. “I could not afford to get measles.”
Peters, who trusts mainstream medicine, considers himself a modern Mennonite. He wears a goatee and a Texas Tech University ring, which traditional Mennonites consider vain. He owns 17 guns even though Mennonites are pacifists. Despite his neighbors avoiding the public eye, Peters is a town celebrity because he hosts a weekly radio show and pens monthly columns in the local newspaper.
His mother grew up in a Mennonite colony in Mexico and combined natural and Western medicine. She administered Tylenol and Vicks VapoRub, smeared pig lard on her children’s chests to relieve congestion and believed Dr. Pepper was a cure-all.
Mennonites are predisposed to questioning vaccine mandates. Their history of persecution from political and religious authorities has created a culture of distrust in the government. The Mennonite movement broke from Anabaptists in 16th century Northern Europe, moving through Russia, Canada, Mexico and the U.S. in sequestered communities — Peters estimates that a third are undocumented. Many Mennonite women in Seminole still know only Low German, which is spoken in Northern Germany and parts of the Netherlands.
Despite valuing traditional remedies, Peters’ mom was vaccinated as a child and she would later immunize her children, including Peters. She fell in line with much of her generation of Mennonites.
“You can’t argue the fact that vaccinated people fight measles better,” Peters said, adding that he vaccinated his two daughters after doing research and talking to doctors.
Peters’ take on health care is a product of both his past and present.
Against his doctors’ advice, Peters drank a fruit juice that Mennonites insisted would cure his cancer and which he said tastes like rotten cherries. He drew the line at offers from friends and another leukemia patient to take the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, opting to give his $15,000 monthly prescription a chance.
He appreciates unorthodox approaches to medicine — like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promoting vitamin A to treat measles — and he speculates that natural remedies could be as effective as vaccines.
But, he wishes more of his community vaccinated because he knows vaccines eradicated polio. Before the measles shot became available in 1963, the disease killed 400 to 500 American children each year. Peters believes modern medicine is why he’s here today.
“The hospital system saved my life,” he said.
Even as the measles outbreak endangered him in his vulnerable condition, it also solidified his views against forced immunizations. He wondered whether his two rounds of COVID shots could have caused his leukemia.
This year, pushes for Mennonites to vaccinate and quarantine gave Peters flashbacks to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Already opposed to government rules, Mennonites bristled at pressure from authorities to stick out their arms during the 2020 outbreak.
“The pro-vax crowd, I think in my opinion, has kind of messed up,” Peters said. “If you’re living in the land of the free and you pretty much have to get vaccinated, to the third generation Mennonites — the kids that grew up here — that just doesn’t sound right.”
Aside from the splotched children in restaurants and Walmart, Seminole felt unremarkable to Froese as measles cases ticked up and her town became a nightly feature on news programs.
Froese saw her sister visiting from Kansas, swapped health supplies with another sister and cared for her nephew who came down with an unknown illness. She skipped only one Sunday mass when her teens were sick.
She went about life normally because she believed measles wasn’t a threat to her family.
“As sick as they were, they’ve been just as sick with other things that they’ve had in the past, just then they didn’t have the rash,” she said. “And they got it, they got over it, and we went on with life.”
She disavowed vaccines after hearing about children of people she knew who were never the same after they received the shot: a young boy gone blind, and a girl who seized and foamed at the mouth, becoming a quadriplegic, she said. Local Mennonite shop owners, church-goers and pastors cite similar stories, saying the risk isn’t worth the immunity.
Studies have proven time and again that vaccines have a low risk of severe complications, though mild effects are common as the body builds protection.
It’s impossible to know whether vaccines caused these maladies without the patients’ full medical history, said Wesley Friesen, a Mennonite operating room nurse at the Seminole Hospital District.
“You want to trust that what they’re telling you is true. But sometimes you wonder, what’s the whole story?” Friesen said, expressing skepticism about whether serious vaccine complications resulted from the medicine. “There are individuals that did experience negative side effects, probably, you know, for decades. But you have to look at the whole picture. I mean, are they basing their decision on a relatively small percentage?”
As measles spread, local health food stores began distributing unconventional treatments including free cod liver oil and budesonide inhalers, which are typically used for asthma, while vitamin A flew off the shelves. Mennonites reached for wonder oil — herb-infused rubbing alcohol to reduce fevers — and supplements that claim to enhance various bodily functions.
Though some Seminole residents got vaccinated amid the outbreak, drive-by vaccine tents largely sat dormant.
Like Peters, Froese also believes COVID turned more Mennonites off vaccines.
She thought authorities overreacted to scare people into getting immunized. The restrictions felt overbearing and punitive: A local hospital limited visits, leaving Froese’s children to gaze at their cancer-ridden grandmother through the window for what they thought would be the last time. She was alarmed when a hospital refused to administer ivermectin to her father-in-law, though global health authorities recommend against treating COVID-19 with ivermectin.
“I know when you’re dealing with something that you don’t understand, you know, for the doctors, even they have to do something that they then think works,” Froese said. “But again, I think COVID was blown out of proportion.”
And so was the measles outbreak, she said.
After recovering, her daughters shed hair for two months and one developed an acne-like condition that vitamins couldn’t treat, but antibiotics did. Measles can cause “immune amnesia,” where the body forgets how to fight infections for months to years, but Froese questions whether the after effects of measles are as bad as doctors and public health authorities have made them out to be, and whether the skin condition was related to measles at all.
She’s proud of how her community responded to the outbreak and now believes more strongly that they can fend off diseases without official help.
“We were getting so much media attention and blame for all this kind of stuff,” Froese said. “And I think we all just decided that we would rally together and get through it.”
On a recent Sunday, more than 170 cars filled the gravel parking lot of the Mennonite Evangelical Church in Seminole. In a pew facing walls decorated with two plain wreaths, a man in scuffed cowboy boots wrapped his arm around his wife, who wore an ankle-length velvet dress, emerald green.
Their five children had recovered from measles, and in July, one daughter won gold in the national tumbling competition. The disease was behind them.
In early December, almost a year from the start of the outbreak, 17 new cases appeared in the U.S. If these strains share DNA with those in West Texas, the country might follow Canada in losing its measles elimination status, which it’s had for 25 years.
At least in Seminole, people are safe from another measles event because they’ve either been vaccinated or fought the disease, said Dr. Wendell Parkey, chief of staff for Seminole Memorial Hospital.
But he’s now staring down the barrel of a different vaccine-preventable outbreak: whooping cough. He thinks all the medical community can do now is adapt their practices to prepare for more sick people each year.
“I don’t want a society like this. I’d rather be in a society that vaccinates,” Parkey said. “But you don’t get a choice on playing that game.”
Health officials spread the word about the importance of measles vaccines in person and through the radio, newspapers and churches. Local doctors and Mennonite experts fear the town’s anti-vaccine camp will respond the same to the next outbreak unless authorities learn to speak their figurative — and sometimes literal — language to answer their questions and build confidence.
While Seminole residents circulated messages to avoid reporters during the outbreak, John Dueck, editor of the Canada-based newspaper Die Mennonitische Post, became a de facto Mennonite expert for government officials and news media.
Dueck published an editorial explaining the facts about measles and vaccines in terms that appealed to Mennonite values about protecting the community. He said Mennonites and the Canadian government gave him positive feedback.
“If you come into a community just in time when everything is burning, you will find people nervous,” he said.
But they might be more receptive to messages from authorities about vaccines and health scares if they already formed a relationship during calm times, he added.
Seminole doctors worry that will be tough after the measles outbreak whittled what scant trust remained among the vaccine hesitant community.
While some Mennonite families got vaccinated during the outbreak, Friesen said health messaging fell short because it came across as orders. He said a better approach is to teach people how vaccines work and invite questions.
“I guess we haven’t figured that out yet,” Friesen said. “Nothing has changed, and I don’t think it’s going to change for a long time.”