NBC News
A 6 -year -old Texan girl died in February of measles; It was the first death in the United States because of this disease in two decades.
His death could have served as a warning to an increasingly reluctant country to vaccines about the consequences of rejecting the only guaranteed way of combating this preventable disease.
Instead, the Anti -Vacunas movement is explaining what happened in a different way, turning the girl and her family in propaganda, an emotional pillar of the wrong argument that vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent.
The afflicted girl’s parents have only granted an interview with the cameras, Children’s Health Defense, the non -profit anti -mood group founded and directed until recently by Robert F. Kennedy Jr, current secretary of health and human services. In a video broadcast on the Internet on Monday, young parents remembered in the middle of crying how their daughter became ill of measles, after pneumonia, how she was hospitalized and connected to an artificial respirator, and how she died.
The couple, who is Mennonite, believes that the death of their daughter was the will of God. When Children’s Health Defense programming director Polly Tommey, specifically asked about other parents who, hearing her story could “run away, panic prey”, to vaccinate against measles, papers and rubella (SPR), the parents of the deceased minor rejected the possibility that offered the best opportunity to avoid the death of her daughter.
“The vaccines are not put on,” said the girl’s mother. Measles, he added, “is not as bad as they paint it.” He assured that his other four children recovered after having received alternative treatments from an anti -vacussion doctor, including cod liver oil, a source of vitamin A, and Budesonide, an inhaled steroid that is usually used for asthma.
“In addition, measles is good for the body,” added the girl’s father, adding, through a low German interpreter, that measles reinforces the immune system and protects against cancer; A false assumption often offered by the anti -vacussion groups and recently repeated by Kennedy.
Without evidence, the influential people of Children’s Health Defense and other areas have rethink the tragedy of the girl’s death as a proof of the effectiveness of priests not proven such as vitamin A, of ill -treatment by a hospital and even a plot to weaken Kennedy in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS, in English).
The video is part of a strategy, then many others that Children’s Health Defense have produced before. Together with discredited science, the modern anti -vaccine movement was built on the personal stories of parents – recovered through websites, bus tours and anti -vaccine documentaries – who claimed that vaccines harmed their children.
And, despite the fact that experts point out the overwhelming amount of data on vaccine safety, raw stories – directly agreed to the followers of the movement – provide a narrative that public health officials, bound by evidence and forced by institutional caution, fight to counteract.
“It was an intelligent way to focus on the intuition of a mother, who is very sacred in our culture,” said Karen Ernst, director of the non -profit group Voices for Vaccines. “That was essential to build the movement.”
“The problem is that a simple story told quickly is much easier to believe than a nuanced and well -founded truth told later,” Ernst added. “In that sense, public health is always behind the Anti -Vacunas movement. They never go ahead of it.”
A family representative did not respond immediately to a request for comments. Children’s Health Defense and Covenant Children’s Hospital did not do it either.
The HHS Press Secretary, Emily Hilliard, responded with a link to a recent opinion article on the Fox News website, in which Kennedy wrote: “Vaccines not only protect children individually against measles, but also contribute to the immunity of the community, protecting those who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons.”
Measles has spread without control by the Mennonite community of Gaines County, Texas, sick with more than 190 people, most young children, and reaching neighboring areas. The real number of patients, according to the authorities, is lower than the real due to the lack of adequate evidence. In most children, measles causes fever and cutaneous eruptions with itching, but can lead to serious complications, such as pneumonia, seizures and brain injuries. Of every 1,000 cases, about 200 children require hospitalization, 50 develop pneumonia, one experiences a cerebral inflammation that can cause disability, and one to three will die.
In Gaines County, hundreds of parents have rowed to go to an impromptu clinic in a warehouse led by Dr. Ben Edwards, an alternative Lubbock doctor who treats children with an unproven protocol of cod and Budesonide liver oil.
Edwards had not treated the 6 -year -old girl who died, but then treated the rest of the couple’s children.
“Dr. Edwards was there for us,” said the mother.
Edwards did not respond to the request for comments.
Despite the urgency of the measles crisis, the official response of medical groups has been normally restrained. In a Declaration on Tuesday, a coalition of 34 scientific and medical organizations, including the American Association of Immunologists, the American Medical College and the American Academy of Pediatrics, reiterated their support for vaccines such as “Public Health Cornerstone, a brilliant example of the power of scientific research and vital tool in the fight against preventable diseases”.
In a media panorama in which misinformation is spread faster than institutional statements This is unlikely to be enough.
“We can provide information to other people and limit ourselves to saying this is what the data shows, but perhaps there are people with a lot of charisma to help transmit those messages,” said Stephen Jameson, president of the American Association of Immunologists. “But it is difficult, because if a vaccine is preventive, where is the rescue of someone? How is the story that ‘the child does not contract the disease’?”
In this environment, Kennedy plays a key public role in front of HHS, a platform that has already used to spread falsehoods about measles, the triple viral vaccine and the Texas outbreak.
In an interview with Fox Nation, Kennedy said without evidence that immunity against measles was accompanied by cancer protections and heart disease, that cod liver oil and steroid girl who died. In another interview in Fox News, Kennedy said, also without evidence, that the triple viral vaccine causes deaths every year.
“The misinformation is really in the lead,” said Kris Ehresmann, recently retired director of the Infectious Diseases Division of the Department of Health of Minnesota. “He has gone from a father who tries to evaluate the best decision for his son to a hostile movement that I did not see in the first days of my career.”
“The COVID-19 politicized vaccines and science, actually,” Ehresmann added. “And that gave anti -Vacunas people a huge support point.”
Patsy Stinchfield, pediatric nurse, has seen how the uncontrolled propagation of a disease can change their minds to parents, with the right messages. Remember to have gone “mosque in mosque” during a minnesota measles outbreak in 2017 to listen to the concerns of the Somali community and educate local religious leaders about the danger of measles and safety of the triple viral vaccine.
He spoke with almost all parents of hospitalized children in the outbreak. “Many of them said: ‘My God, I didn’t know I would be so serious. Why didn’t I know?’
These stories have not yet been publicly shared by the parents of sick children in the outbreak of western Texas.
Last week, the Bigree anti -vacussion activist dedicated a segment of his Internet program, The Highwireto interview Mothers of Texas whose children not vaccinated contracted and survived measles. While the parents talked about their decision not to vaccinate their children, the photos of one of them, who had to be transferred by helicopter to a Lubbock hospital, filled the screen. The girl lay in a hospital bed, with glassy eyes, connected to roads and tubes.
After years defending that measles was not a threat to healthy children in the United States, Bigree was visibly surprised and sought an explanation: perhaps measles had mutated and became more serious, he suggested.
“That girl is very sick”said.
