She says she is against vaccines in general and scoffs when asked about the Covid-19 vaccine………………..“This is West Texas,” Romano says. “We don’t believe in that.”
SEMINOLE, Texas—The dusty plains of Gaines County stretch endlessly, peanut fields fading into cotton farms and oil fields, punctuated by signs touting God.
This sprawling rural region is defined by oil, agriculture and a large Mennonite community—members of the Anabaptist family of churches that includes the Amish—who emigrated here from Mexico in the 1970s.
Now, it is also the epicenter of a measles outbreak that has spread across nine counties since late January, leading to nearly 200 documented infections, 23 hospitalizations and the nation’s first measles-related death in a decade. The same strain of the measles is responsible for 30 reported cases across the state line in Lea County, New Mexico, where a measles-related death is under investigation.
Gaines County exemplifies pockets of America where antivaccine sentiment has surged, fueled by deepening distrust in the U.S. government after the pandemic. With many states making it easier to get vaccine exemptions for school-age children, what was once a rare exception has become common.
“Personal choice” is a term I heard many times when talking to Gaines County area residents about the decision to get a vaccine, even among health officials. What has long been hailed by doctors as a critical lifesaving public-health tool is now considered optional.
Even a measles outbreak and death isn’t enough to drive many residents into free vaccine clinics. While that is a personal choice, deeply entrenched vaccine skepticism affects us all.
No big deal
There are few obvious signs of an outbreak in Gaines County. There is one large LED board in Seminole, the sleepy county seat, that warns parents that measles is more than a rash. Masks are scarce, even in a packed waiting room in the city’s lone hospital.
Many residents are loath to talk about measles or vaccines. Some say the outbreak is exaggerated and liken measles to any other respiratory illnesses.
“They’re just making a big deal of it,” says Maria Romano, cutting hair at her Main Street salon. “I’ve been working with people who have had it. We didn’t get it. I don’t think that everybody can get it that easy.”
Romano, originally from Mexico but not Mennonite, doesn’t know if she ever got the measles vaccine. But she says she is against vaccines in general and scoffs when asked about the Covid-19 vaccine.
“This is West Texas,” Romano says. “We don’t believe in that.”
Public-health messages haven’t reached this remote corner. Few know or spout the talking points of most doctors: that measles is the among the most contagious diseases known to mankind. That 20% of unvaccinated people with measles end up in the hospital. Or that getting the recommended two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine—known as the MMR shot—results in 97% protection against the virus that causes a cough, runny nose and red, watery eyes, followed by a fever and rash.
Health officials don’t know how the current outbreak started. They say it likely was circulating in Gaines County before being detected in late January, when two children were hospitalized in Lubbock, the nearest city with an intensive-care unit, some 80 miles away.
Nothing in the Mennonite religion prohibits vaccines but as vaccination hesitancy increases in rural America, it has also increased in such populations, says Steve Nolt, director of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College. Vaccine-exemption rates for kindergartners in Gaines County have grown from about 7.5% a decade ago to 18% last school year.
The West Texas Mennonites trace their migration from Poland, Ukraine, Canada and finally Mexico. Local doctors and residents say some Mennonites avoid the traditional health system, opting for midwives, alternative doctors and herbal remedies instead.
Old versus young
But not everyone. Cutting hair next to Romano at the salon, Justina Harder, a 25-year-old who is Mennonite, says she is vaccinated against the measles and believes in vaccines. But she says there are those in the community who are antivaccine and embrace a “natural” lifestyle, which perplexes her.
“As far as antivaccine Mennonites go, that seems to be kind of a New Age thing, like younger Mennonites,” says Harder, “because most of the older Mennonites that I grew up with, they’re vaccinated and they have nothing against it.”
Business is brisk in the area’s natural pharmacies. Health stores feature an array of supplements, herbs and vitamins, some costing upward of $100. There are large glass jars of herbs such as dried blessed thistle and horsetail, goat-milk formula for toddlers, and products claiming to boost the immune system.
At Health 2 U, a health-food and natural pharmacy, a sign on the door says “Stop Diabetes Naturally.”
At Natural Care in Seminole, a 36-year-old Mennonite mother named Mary, who didn’t want to give her last name, shops for supplements. She recalls having measles as a child in Mexico and says she recovered quickly.
Her three young boys are unvaccinated and home-schooled. If they get measles she said she would handle it the way she always does: supporting the body, keeping them comfortable, and giving them love. “It doesn’t scare me,” she says. “I just try to live a healthy lifestyle.”
Tina Siemens, director of the West Texas Living Heritage museum in Seminole and an author of books on the town’s history, is helping translate health-department material into Low German—the language spoken by many Mennonites. She is also overseeing a fundraising campaign for the family of the 6-year-old girl who died of measles. Siemens says attitudes toward vaccines vary.
“Those who have chosen not to vaccinate, they’re just implementing all the methods that they can naturally,” she says. Her Lubbock-based integrative-medicine doctor travels to Seminole to treat measles patients with cod liver oil, vitamin C and a steroid.
The RFK Jr. effect
Though Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has touted such remedies, doctors say they aren’t standard or evidence-based treatment for U.S. measles patients.
Siemens says she and the larger community embrace RFK Jr., who has criticized vaccine mandates and said vaccinations are a matter of personal choice. “The community loves him,” she says, adding that today she wouldn’t get the measles vaccine or vaccinate her sons. “They feel that they have a voice.”
At Seminole Family Medical Clinic, a room is packed with patients waiting to see a health professional. The clinic’s medical director, Dr. Wendell Parkey, a gregarious Texan with custom-made cowboy boots featuring his son’s football number, functions as a family-medicine doctor and obstetrician-gynecologist.
By 4:30 p.m., Parkey has seen 30 patients, five of whom he says he tested for measles. “I’d never seen the measles until like a month ago,” says Parkey. “Now, when they walk in the room you can see, ‘Yeah you’ve probably got it.’ ”
Asked whether people are more inclined to get their children vaccinated, he doesn’t miss a beat. “No way,” he says. “Before Covid I could convince some. Now it’s like, forget it.”
Parkey and other health officials say the real measles count is likely much higher than official figures. Most of the children coming down with measles recover at home. The parents don’t realize there are other possible complications later, like pneumonia, or worse, brain swelling, he says.
“They’re not coming,” he says. “I just don’t think they see it as the problem we do.”
