Travel & Lifestyle: Parents Whose Unvaccinated Child Died From Measles Say They Remain Anti-Vaccine

A Texas couple whose unvaccinated 6-year-old daughter died after being hospitalized for measles last month, marking the nation’s first child death from the virus in a decade, said they have no regrets about not vaccinating their children and would urge others not to.

“We would absolutely not take the MMR,” the child’s mother said of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccination in an interview with the anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, which was founded by vaccine critic and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“They would still say, don’t do the shots,” a translator said for the couple, who are members of the Mennonite community in Gaines County and spoke in both English and Low German.

“There’s doctors that can help with measles. They’re not as bad as they’re making it out to be,” the translator said of media reporting on the current outbreak, which has sickened 309 people in Texas as of Friday, according to the state’s health department. That’s 24 more cases than the total seen in the entire U.S. last year.

The mother, whose name was not shared, reasoned that her other four children, ages 7, 5, 3 and 2, also contracted the highly contagious, but preventable, respiratory disease during her daughter’s illness and were fine after being given some cough medicine, which she said her 6-year-old did not receive.

“The measles wasn’t that bad and they got over it pretty quickly,” she said of her other children.

That appears to line up with statistics released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, showing that approximately 1 in 5 people will be hospitalized for measles if unvaccinated.

“Also, the measles are good for the body,” said the child’s father, who was also not identified in the interview. He reasoned that the virus boosts the immune system, something that Kennedy recently said in an interview with Fox News but that studies have disputed.

The girl’s mother said their daughter came down with a fever on a Saturday and that she took her to see a doctor the following Monday when she started having trouble breathing. She was eventually intubated at a hospital and died a few days later from pneumonia, which is a known complication from the disease and its most common cause of death among infected children, according to the CDC.

The parents raised concerns in their interview about the child’s hospital treatment, with the mother questioning whether more could have been done to save her. The nonprofit also shared a video on social media that questioned whether the child was given a proper antibiotic.

Despite their heartbreaking loss, the couple said that they believe it was their daughter’s time and “she was too good for this Earth,” according to the translator assisting the interview.

“He says that God does no wrong and he wanted this to wake people up,” their translator said, speaking for the father.

Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, where the child was treated, shared a statement with HuffPost Friday that disputed the couple’s interview, saying it contains “misleading and inaccurate claims regarding care provided at Covenant Children’s.”

Though the hospital said it cannot share information directly related to the case, due to patient confidentiality laws, it said it was standing by its health care team.

“What we can say is that our physicians and care teams follow evidence-based protocols and make clinical decisions based on a patient’s evolving condition, diagnostic findings and the best available medical knowledge,” the hospital said.