"Real Story of the Measles Case," "Vibrating Space," and the Tragedy of West Texas Mennonites - And All of Us

What I Learned in my Second Trip to West Texas

SEMINOLE, TX - A couple of weeks ago, J. Stephen Morrison and H. Andrew Schwartz of the Center for International and Strategic Studies gave an astute assessment of the measles crisis in Texas. “The White House is very nervous. Public health officials are very nervous. This is going to take a long time… This could prove to be a very serious moment of reckoning for Secretary Kennedy and for the Trump White House itself.”

If I were Kennedy, in a situation like this, I would form a crisis team and develop a plan. In fact, we appear to be witnessing such a plan being implemented.

This is the story of the measles crisis in West Texas – a storm threatening the local Mennonite community the same way the larger tornado is threatening all of us.

Kennedy has been discussing the measles situation with Tina Siemens, a self-proclaimed Mennonite historian in Gaines County; Dr Ben Edwards, the owner of a large “integrative medicine” practice in Lubbock, 80 miles away; and Dr Richard Bartlett, a doctor with troubled history in Odessa, TX, 70 miles in another direction. Kennedy praised Edwards and Bartlett for achieving “almost miraculous and instantaneous cures” for measles.

Then, in late February, a child developed respiratory failure after being diagnosed with measles, required mechanical ventilation in the intensive care unit (ICU) and passed away (the first measles death in the US in over a decade). Notably, pneumonia is the most common cause of death in young children with measles.

Shortly after, a “crisis team” from Children’s Health Defense (CHD), namely its Chief Scientific Officer, Brian Hooker, and Executive Director, Polly Tommey (both long-time friends of Kennedy), arrived to the area, interviewed the parents of the deceased child and obtained from them the child’s medical records.

CHD sent the records to Dr Pierre Kory, another long-time associate of Kennedy and an ICU physician/pulmonologist accused of COVID misinformation. “After analyzing the documents, Pierre Kory, M.D. has come to the conclusion that this child, unequivocally, “did not die of measles,” CHD reported.

Multiple public appearances followed, repeating this conclusion. Curiously, even the talking points appeared to be coordinated. Edwards, Kory and Bartlett all called for the mainstream media to “retract” their stories attributing the death to measles, now that Kory concluded it’s “unequivocally” not measles-related, even though this characterization was described by the hospital as “misleading and inaccurate.”

In the meantime, Siemens and Edwards arranged a large shipment of cod liver oil and for Edwards to drive over to Gaines County and set up a makeshift clinic, seeing hundreds of largely Mennonite measles patients, while Hooker set up an online donations campaign, with a goal of $200,000, all going to Siemens.

I saw that Mary Holland, Esq, the CEO of CHD, would be speaking at an event called Summit for Truth, so I took the “red eye” Greyhound bus to Rochester, NY to attend. I caught up with Holland during a break. I congratulated her on a well-executed operation, “with a crisis team and a communication campaign.” She thanked me for the compliment, thus confirming my hunch that this was all a plan being executed. “Is Kennedy coordinating this, or CHD,” I asked. “CHD, of course,” she responded. “Kennedy is now in the Government.”

However, it’s also clear that all involved are long-time Kennedy associates (except perhaps Siemens), all know each other well, and all spoke to Kennedy since the start of the crisis, casting my doubt on Holland’s statement that Kennedy was not involved in the planning. Incidentally, Kennedy even asked Susan Monarez, the interim-to-become-permanent head of the CDC, to speak to Bartlett, as Bartlett disclosed on a local radio station, KCRS. (“We spoke several times,” Bartlett said).

At the same Summit for Truth, I spoke to Pierre Kory who was a panelist at the event.

At the end of the program, I found Kory, manspreading at a table, signing copies of his book, “The War on Ivermectin.” I thought of his ICU background and how much he reminded me of other ICU attendings – confident and professorial. On my book, he wrote: “ALEXEI MY FRIEND – LET THE TRUTH PREVAIL!”

I told him I had just gotten back from West Texas, and asked him how he could so “unequivocally” exclude the contribution of measles to the patient’s death. He repeated his assessment that the death was due to mycoplasma pneumonia. I countered that mycoplasma pneumonia, also called “walking pneumonia,” is usually mild and by itself would not explain the fatal outcome. “That’s fair,” he said, after some back and forth and seemingly out of arguments. “Do you want to know the real story on this case? Several of us believe that they weaponized this measles virus - on purpose! She got sicker from this measles probably because they monkeyed with the virus.” “Who? The military? Pentagon? Wuhan,” I asked in disbelief. “Do you know how many bioweapons labs there are,” he reflected.

If Kory and “quite a few” others (Kennedy? CHD? Nobody else saw the medical record) believe it was “weaponized measles,” why not alert the public? Why state that the patient “unequivocally did not die of measles”? Why so adamantly call for the media to “retract” and “apologize?” And why cajole the parents into expressing their steadfast antivax conviction? What would they have said if they knew of this “weaponized measles” hypothesis? Do vaccines protect against this “weaponized measles”? Does cod liver oil work against it? So many questions…

These comments from Holland and Kory were critical pieces of the puzzle I started to assemble in West Texas a few days prior.

Another key player is Dr Ben Edwards, the doctor praised by Kennedy for “almost miraculous and instantaneous recoveries” from measles. His website describes magical cures that led him towards “integrative medicine” 12 years ago, building a “global wellness platform.” His key principle is that “Germs and Genes are not the cause of disease, any more than flies cause garbage.”

As a side note, focusing on genes for a second, here is a doctor who does not believe that genes cause disease, and is being nonetheless praised by our Secretary of HHS. It’s no wonder that this administration gutted NIH research. Imagine Kennedy asking Edwards – “what should I do with all this transgenic mouse research at the NIH?” And Edwards says, “nah, not needed – genes don’t cause disease.” “Ok, let’s defund it then.”

Well, for the record, here is how you show that a gene causes a disease. You take a gene that is “broken” in a human disease – CFTR in cystic fibrosis, for example. But does it cause the disease, or is just a bystander? To answer that, you purposely induce a CTFR mutation in a mouse, creating what’s called transgenic mice. If the mice develops features of cystic fibrosis, you can conclude that this mutation is causing the disease in the human as well. That’s exactly what happens with CFTR, and there are hundreds of other diseases like this. Mice with mutant Amyloid Precursor Protein develop a disease similar to Alzheimer's. Mice with huntingin mutations develop a disease similar to Huntington’s disease. Mice with cancer mutations develop those same cancers, etc.

Why is this important? Because now we can understand how these diseases happen, step by step, and develop new treatments. That’s how tremendous advances in cystic fibrosis were achieved, for example, extending life of patients by decades.

How could Edwards not know this, I thought. The answer came from one of his podcasts. In between a parade of antivaxxers like Andrew Wakefield, Barbara Loe Fisher and others, Edwards ventures into quantum physics to explain that atoms are mostly “empty space” - even steel! (I had just watched some videos of people shooting guns at Tesla Cybertrucks – they might disagree, I thought). And that empty space vibrates when you are in a bad mood, causing disease, he explains.

This theory worries me, and not because of how bizzarre it is, but because scientifically, I cannot think of what type of evidence Edwards imagines could support it. After all, the search for evidence to support one’s beliefs, always being skeptical, is at the core of the practice of medicine.

“We don’t consider Edwards as a member of our medical community,” said Dr Katherine Wells, Lubbock’s Director of Public Health. “We have many excellent doctors – we have a medical school here.”

To understand how this fringe doctor became the go-to for the Mennonite community in Gaines County, I headed there to meet with Tina Siemens - the other piece of this puzzle - a friend of Edwards and a self-proclaimed Mennonite historian and media go-to spokesperson.

We met at her museum which she founded 2 years ago, in beautiful farmland on the other end of Seminole from the main Mennonite community.

Siemens and her husband own a construction company, JW&T. A search for the name yields old minutes of Gaines County Commissioner, with an entry that caught my eye – “Consider awarding bid for … renovation: one bid was received from JW&T, Inc. in the amount of $1,084,676.98…Carried unanimously.”

The small museum, the construction company offices and a sprawling mansion are right next to each other. The museum is housed where the family airplane hangar used to be, Siemens explained.

At the door is a display of Siemens’ three books that she has spent years promoting with a small group of podcast hosts.

After reviewing a large poster depicting Mennonite history, we started talking about medicine.

She became interested in holistic medicine when her mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. They went to visit an MD Anderson affiliate in Lubbock. “When my mother looked at the women without hair, she said ‘I’m not getting chemotherapy,’” Siemens shared. They traveled to Mexico where a healer chopped a special tree for them in the woods. Tea from that tree kept her mother alive and well for 5 years, Siemens told me. They continued to go to Mexico to seek holistic care, but switched to Edwards 12 years ago when Mexico became too dangerous.

I asked about Mennonite traditional healing remedies or approaches, but she could not give any specific examples. She dismissed allegations in the media about inadequate education as the reason for low vaccination rates. “Our people know how to read, unlike the first settlers in 1977. They are doing their own research online.” “Are they educated in science, as well?” I asked. “Absolutely,” she answered. “They read the package inserts!”

“The reason they don’t want vaccines is because we’ve had 12 vaccine-injured people,” Siemens explained. She described one 41 year-old man who according to the parents suffered a vaccine injury as a small child – became disabled within minutes of getting a vaccine and has remained in this state his whole life (a common description in the antivax world, even though I cannot think of any adverse reaction that develops over minutes and lasts a lifetime.) “Have they talked about this being a vaccine injury before,” I asked. “No, they kept it a secret until this measles situation,” Siemens asserted. Another case she described is a 22-year-old who was “vaccine-injured” as a child and just recently died of heart failure.

Overall, Siemens’s antivax views are exactly from the MAHA/CHD playbook. Multiple documentary crews came to visit her, including Mikki Willis, the infamous producer of Plandemic, a documentary that was released early during COVID, peddling wild conspiracies. Even though it was removed from social media after only 2 days because of its biased contents and dangerous public health impact, Plandemic was viewed by 8 million people, contributing to vaccine hesitancy.

Siemens told me that months ago Willis predicted an “attack” on Texas by Kennedy’s enemies. Siemens agrees. “I think we were targeted here in Gaines County with the latest outbreak of measles,” she said, echoing Kory’s comments.

Now Willis is back – and the West Texas measles crisis is his next project. Siemens told me that his crew was there recently along with the CHD team, filming “vaccine injured” and documenting “miraculous cures” achieved by Edwards’ cod liver oil and Bartlett’s budesonide. Probably “coming soon to a theater near you,” I thought, except this time nobody will take this documentary off social media, thanks to Trump’s undoing of content moderation in the name of “freedom of speech,” and big tech quietly obliging (more on this in a later story).

Siemens also told me that Suzanne Humphries, another antivaxer, is coming to Joe Rogan’s podcast “putting the whole measles death issue to rest.” Indeed, Seimens was well-informed - the podcast was released two days after we spoke. And Edwards on his podcast congratulated Siemens on being frequented by the media – they are apparently keeping each other informed.

Scary to think that Siemens is the “bridge” between the Mennonite community and public health officials, as she described herself. She is helping translate vaccine information into Low German. Now, knowing her extreme antivax views, I alerted the officials that those translations should be independently verified. I checked one flyer photographed by the Washington Post. Looked correct but even subtle changes might matter.

“How are the health outcomes overall in this community,” I asked. Siemens provided an overall rosy assessment without any specifics. Unfortunately, there is no data to back up her optimism. Literature on this topic is scant, but one study in Amish communities from 2014 to 2021 demonstrated infant mortality of about 10%, and stillbirth an additional 10%. These poor outcomes need to be characterized in-depth, not written off as vaccine injuries.

My third stop was the Seminole Mennonite community itself.

Pastor Duncan Smith, a senior leader within Mennonite Church USA, describes the Seminole community as follows:

Mennonite Church USA is one of more than 40 distinct Anabaptist and Mennonite groups across the United States. The Mennonites in Gaines County are separate from Mennonite Church USA. They are part of a group referred to as Old Colony Mennonites. They originated in Russia, eventually emigrating to the United States in 1977 through Canada and Mexico and settled in Gaines County. They are borne of the 16th Century Radical Reformation like all Anabaptists, but, similar to the Amish, they have maintained their traditional old-world lifestyles and conservative practices. The group in Texas primarily speaks Plautdietsch, a Low German dialect, dresses plainly and generally sends their children to their own schools. Vaccination rates in this community have been historically low.

He goes on to clarify:

As a denomination, Mennonite Church USA does not request vaccine exemptions for our members on behalf of our religious beliefs… Vaccines approved by the Food and Drug Administration have been proven to be safe and the most effective way to prevent measles.

We pray for our brothers and sisters of the Old Colony Mennonites in Texas as they deal with the measles outbreak in their community.

There are no mansions here in Mennonite neighborhoods of Seminole – only small houses tightly packed together along narrow roads. I asked a group of young people, maybe 18 to 20 years old, whether they were happy with their science education in traditional schools.” “I never learned science,” one answered.

My heart skipped a beat. I thought, maybe they misunderstood – perhaps they were learning separate subjects like biology, chemistry etc without calling them “science.” I clarified, “So you never learned how people get sick, and how the body defends against infections”? “No.” “Would you like to learn?” “Yes, absolutely!”

This lack or poor quality of science education is a known phenomenon in ultra-religious communities. An 8-years-long investigation by New York City officials recently concluded that ultra-orthodox Jewish schools in New York City were not providing students with basic secular education.

So it appears that there are multiple factors that are putting ultra-religious communities at risk: lack or poor quality of science education, as well as their closed nature. A research study among the Amish and Old Order Mennonites shows that this “echo chamber” effect in a closed religious community contributes to low vaccine uptake, concluding that “Healthcare providers should consider constructing culturally competent programs to reach closed communities.” The same effect probably operates in ultra-orthodox Jewish communities.

Unfortunately, the parallels do not end there. In 2019, Hasidic Jews suffered an outbreak of measles similar to the one in Seminole.

And like today, guess who showed up. Kennedy’s associate Del Bigtree, known for his conspiracy-laden 2016 documentary Vaxxed, and currently CEO of MAHA Alliance, visited Hasidic Jewish communities back in 2019. “Sustained applause greeted Del Bigtree, a former television-producer-turned-activist who often wears a yellow star, similar to those required of Jews in Nazi Germany, to show solidarity with parents ordered to keep unvaccinated children at home,” The Washington Post reported at the time.

And there is another problem: the language barrier. The Mennonites I spoke to in Seminole told me that many people in the community do not speak English, consistent with Pastor Smith’s assessment. This includes the parents of the deceased measles patient. A community member felt that their words were distorted in translation. The father never meant to say that his daughter is “better off” in another world. (I recall gasping at that sentence as it was translated).

Imagine someone who never learned any science, and with poor English, trying to read the package insert for a vaccine. First, which one? There are two different MMR vaccines, and six different Hep B vaccines on the market, for example. And the package inserts are well-known to be unreadable, even under the best of circumstances.

And now imagine this person who never learned any science, with poor English and struggling to read a package insert, being asked a lead-in question while the cameras are rolling: “We spent the morning in Dr Bennet’s clinic, and all the parents are sitting there saying they would rather have measles than MMR vaccination because they’ve seen so much injury, which we have as well. Do you still feel the same way?”

Well, the parents of the deceased measles patient were asked this exact question by the CHD team, and of course the mother said “Yes absolutely, we would not take MMR. The measles wasn’t that bad.” “Also, the measles are good for the body,” said the father.

This message ricocheted around the internet. A google search for “parents of Texas child who died of measles” – in quotes, just this exact phrase – yields over 60,000 hits. And as we know from misinformation researchers, once a message gets out, no amount of retraction can undo it completely - residual damage always remains. This is known as the "continued influence effect."

The community is on edge. Trust in mainstream healthcare is low following COVID. Without proper English, and with no understanding of science, it was hard to understand why loved ones were taken away into isolation and died there with no chance to say good-bye. And challenges of modern US healthcare do not help. “We get seen for 5-10 minutes, and then the bills arrive – I got a bill for over $20,000,” one community member told me. “I have been paying it out in installments, but suddenly it was turned over to a collection agency.” (This community needs urgent social worker support, but for now, I offered my phone number to be shared with anyone who wants help in negotiating bills with the hospital.)

For all these reasons, community members are reluctant to seek mainstream healthcare, perhaps due to Edwards’ rhetoric minimizing the dangers of measles. “We don't need to be fearful of measles,” he said on his podcast, in contradition to Kory’s assessment that this measles strain is “weaponized”. Siemens, who is not a physician, offered her opinion that “if your child gets oxygen levels in the 70s, then it's time to seek higher help.” This is very wrong and dangerous. Guidelines are very clear on when to take a child with measles to the emergency room.

These false reassurances and wrong guidance are taking a toll. As I learned from a member of the community, recently the family of a girl sick with measles waited too long. By the time they brought her to a hospital in Gaines County, she needed to be airlifted to Lubbock, but she was without oxygen for too long and now appears to have suffered permanent neurologic damage.

Vaccine denial has its other tolls, actively debated in the community Whatsapp group with about 500 members. One mother needed to take her child to a specialist in Houston for a chronic condition. But the specialist apparently does not see unvaccinated children. “Do not give in – do not get the shots,” other mothers protested.

Finally, I was curious whether Siemens is an appropriate spokesperson for the Mennonite community, as she presents herself to the media. The community members I met either don’t know who she is, or do not feel she speaks for them. I agree – she did not mention to me any of the challenges I heard from the community.

The Mennonite community is therefore under multiple threats from Kennedy’s crew. First, antivax propaganda. Second, encouragement of self-medication. Several children with measles self-treated with vitamin A promoted by Kennedy and Edwards were recently hospitalized for Vitamin A toxicity. Edwards offered some bizzarre reassurance on a recent podcast (my emphasis):

From a toxicity standpoint, it's very, very difficult, next to almost impossible to get toxic on vitamin A from a food source. There is evidence in the literature, the Merck manual talks about a Arctic explorer who ate a polar bear liver and they estimated over a million international units of vitamin A. And he started to experience some toxicity so he stopped eating that and immediately the symptoms went away.

Sadly this anecdote Edwards cites is in the “adult” section of the Merck Manual article. But under “children” the Merck Manual cites 300,000 IU as the toxicity threshold, which corresponds to only 23 tablespoons of cod liver oil, even if taken over a period of days (it accumulates in the liver – so the arctic explorer’s instant recovery is highly implausible and not even mentioned in the Merck manual). As in the vibrating space story, the logic of medical evidence is broken.

Third, the recommendations to avoid going to the hospital for as long as possible are also highly dangerous, as the case of the emergency airlift demonstrates. And related to this, the forth threat –encouraging parents to keep their children at home masks the true scale and momentum of the epidemic, since these children are not tested. And the CDC messaging has been unusually muffled for a crisis of this size. Enter an Orwellian world in which we may not know how big our epidemics are.

I end with a call to action.

Let’s be honest: What is happening to US science and healthcare is a tragedy. This is the word Senator Hickenlooper, sadly the only scientist in US Senate, used in a recent meeting.

It’s a tragedy for all of us. The same players who are threatening the Mennonite community – Edwards, Kory, Bartlett, Siemens - are in Kennedy’s inner circle with a megaphone reaching across the country and beyond.

Kennedy’s war on vaccines, science and medicine continues. Massive layoffs have started. Who will be the new leaders? Perhaps we can guess, looking at the anti-vaccine activist appointed by Kennedy to oversee the new CDC-led study aiming to show that vaccines cause autism. Such a study, if it fraudulently concludes a link, this time with a CDC stamp of approval, would cause tremendous death and suffering around the world through a drop in vaccine use. If I were Monarez, I would protest or resign.

A private sector takeover of our healthcare is unfolding, according to the conservative movement’s corporatist agenda. “The FDA as we've known it is finished,” wrote Robert Califf today.

My head is spinning. But I will not forget the young Mennonite who never learned science. I vowed to myself to return to Seminole, somehow engaging with the Mennonite community leaders (I invited Siemens to join me, but so far she declined my offer, citing other commitments), to make sure that those who tragically never learned science – or did not learn enough, wherever they may be - are empowered to make informed decisions about their health.