How the anti-vaccine movement weaponized a 6-year-old’s measles death

In February, a 6 year old Texan The first child In the United States, dying of measles in two decades.

His death could have been A warning to an increasingly vaccinating country of the vaccine on the consequences of avoiding it the sole guarantee of fighting against preventable disease.

Instead, the anti-vaccine movement diffuses a different lesson, transforming the girl and her family into a propaganda, an emotional board in the erroneous argument that vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent.

The child’s mourning parents gave only one interview with the camera, to the defense of children’s health, the non-profit anti-vaccin group founded and previously directed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now secretary for health and social services. In a Video broadcast online On Monday, young parents smothered the sobs, recalling how their daughter fell ill from measles, then pneumonia, how she was hospitalized and put a fan, and how she died.

The couple, who are mennonites, believe that the death of their daughter was the will of God. When the director of programming of Children’s Health Defense of Defense, Polly Tommey, asked questions specifically about the parents who heard their history and who could rush, panic “, to obtain the measles vaccine, the mumps and the rubella (MMR), the parents reprimanded the intervention which offered the best chance of preventing the death of their daughter.

“Don’t take the blows,” said the daughter’s mother. The measles, she added, is “not as bad as they do”. She noted that her four other children all reappeared after receiving alternative treatments from an anti-vaccine doctor, including cod liver oil, a source of vitamin A, and Budesonide, an inhaled steroid generally used for asthma.

“In addition, measles is good for the body,” said the girl’s father, adding a German weak interpreter that measles stimulates the immune system and cancer services – a false supposition often offered by anti -vaccine groups and Repeated recently by Kennedy.

Without evidence, influencers of the defense of children’s health and beyond have cropped the tragedy of the death of the girl as proof – of the effectiveness of unproven healing such as vitamin A, of mistreatment by a hospital and even a conspiracy aimed at Saper Kennedy at the Ministry of Health and Social Services.

It is a familiar game book, after countless videos, the defense of children’s health produced before it. With Science divided sinceThe modern anti -vaccine movement was built on the personal accounts of parents – collected via websites, Bus visits And anti-vaccine – Who said the vaccines have harmed their children.

And even if the experts indicate an overwhelming Vaccine safety dataTHE gross and immediate accounts – Delivered directly to the disciples of the movement – provide a story that public health officials, linked by evidence and limited by institutional prudence, fight to counter.

“It was a warned way of focusing the intuition of a mother, a insight as mother, who is very crowned in our culture,” said Karen Ernst, director of the non -profit group Voices for Vaccins. “This was essential in the way they built the movement.”

“The problem is that a simple story told quickly is so much easier to believe than a nuanced truth and well -told said later,” added Ernst. “In this way, public health still continues the anti-vaccine movement. They never become ahead. ”

A family representative did not immediately respond to a request for comments. The health defense hospital and the children’s alliance has also not answered.

HHS assistant press secretary Emily Hilliard replied with a link To a recent editorial on the Fox News website, in which Kennedy wrote: “Vaccines protect not only individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons.”

The measles has spread largely uncontrolled through the Mennonite community of the county of Gaines, Texas, disgusting more than 190 people, most of them of small children and reaching neighboring regions. The real number of people who fell ill was underestimated, according to the officials, due to inadequate tests. For most children, measles leads to a fever and a rash, but this can cause serious complications, including pneumonia, convulsions and brain damage. On all 1,000 casesAbout 200 children need hospitalization, 50 develop pneumonia, one undergoes swelling of the brain which can cause a handicap and one to three will die.

In the county of sheaths, hundreds of parents aligned themselves for a Dr. Ben EdwardsAnother lubbock practitioner who treats children with an unproven protocol of cod liver oil and boudonide.

Edwards had not treated the 6 -year -old child who died, but then he treated the remaining children of the couple during the wake of their brother.

“Dr. Edwards was there for us,” said the mother.

Edwards did not respond to a request for comments.

Despite the urgency of the measles crisis, the official response of medical groups was generally retained. In A statement TuesdayA coalition of 34 scientific and medical organizations, including the American Association of Immunologists, the American College of Physicians and the American Academy of Pediatrics, reiterated their support for vaccines as “a cornerstone of public health, a brilliant example of scientific research power and a vital tool in the fight against avoidable diseases.”

In a media landscape in which disinformation spreads faster than institutional declarations, it is unlikely that it is enough.

“We can provide information to other people and say that this is what data shows, but it could take from certain people with a high charisma to help deliver these messages,” said Stephen Jameson, president of the American Association of Immunologists. “But it’s difficult, because if a vaccine is preventive, where is someone’s rescue? How do you tell the story” The child has no illness “?”

In this environment, Kennedy plays a key public role at the head of HHS, a platform that he has already used to spread lies on measles, the Ror vaccine and the Texas epidemic.

In an interview Fox nationKennedy falsely claimed This measles immunity came with cancer protections and heart disease, that cod liver oil and steroids had provided “miraculous” treatment for measles in Texas and that measles was a threat only for unhealthy children, suggesting that malnutrition “could be a problem” with the girl who died. In Another interview with Fox NewsKennedy said unrelated that the Ror vaccine causes deaths each year.

“Disinformation really leads the day,” said Kris Ehresmann, recently retired director of the Department of Minnesota Health Department. “We started from a parent who tries to assess the best decision for his child to a hostile movement that I have not seen in the first days of my career.”

“Politicized vaccines and science are cobeed, really,” added Ehresmann. “And it gave people anti-vacuum a huge foot.”

Patsy Stinchfield, a pediatric practitioner nurse, saw how the uncontrolled propagation of a disease can change the minds of parents – with good messaging. She remembers the “mosque at the mosque at the mosque” during an epidemic of measles in 2017 in Minnesota to listen to the concerns of the Somali community and educate local religious leaders on the danger of measles and the security of the ROR vaccine.

She spoke to almost all the parents of children hospitalized in the epidemic. “Many of them, the parents, were like:” Oh, my God, I did not know that it would be so bad. Why didn’t I know that? “” Said Stinchfield, who was then president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. “The n ° 1 thing I heard was regret – like:” Why didn’t I vaccinated? “”

These stories have not yet been publicly shared by parents of children overshadowed in the western epidemic.

Last week, the anti-vaccin activist, Del Bigtree, devoted a segment of his Internet program, “The top thread“, To interview Texas mothers whose non -vaccinated children have contracted and survived measles. As the parents described standing by their choice not to vaccinate, photos of a child, which was to be deserved in a Lubbock hospital, filled the screen. The girl was lying in a hospital bed, her eyes enameled, linked to lines and berries.

After years of disappearance of measles has not been a threat to healthy American children, Bigtree was visibly surprised and looked for an explanation-perhaps measles had mutated to become more serious, he suggested.

“This little girl is very sick,” he said.