The Texas parents whose 6-year-old unvaccinated daughter died from measles said they have no regrets for not vaccinating their child.
The infected child's preventable death from the virus was the nation's first measles fatality in a decade.
The parents, whose names were not shared, are from the Mennonite community in Gaines County.
They spoke in both English and Low German during an interview accompanied by a translator with Children's Health Defense (CHD), a nonprofit group known for spreading anti-vaccine misinformation, chaired by anti-vaxxer RFK Jr. from 2015 to 2023.
The child who died was one of four siblings who also contracted the contagious respiratory disease but recovered after being given cough medicine, which the 6-year-old did not receive.
The daughter was taken to the ICU with a high fever and increased difficulty breathing. "She was getting very tired of talking," recalled the mother, adding that her daughter's "breathing was bad."
Days later, the child's health took a turn for the worse and had to be intubated.
She eventually died a few days later at the hospital from pneumonia, a common cause of death among children infected with measles, according to the CDC.
You can watch an interview clip with the parents here.
When the interviewer asked the parents' thoughts on the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, the mother said:
"We would absolutely not take the MMR. Like, the measles wasn't that bad."
She added that her other children "got over it pretty quickly."
When asked about what message they would give to "panicking" parents rushing to get children the MMR vaccine "because they think that their child is going to die of measles" based on the death of their 6-year-old, the mother conveyed via the translator that they should still not get vaccinated.
The mother told the translator that "the measles weren't as bad as the press are making them out to be," referring to the news reporting of the 309 cases of measles in Texas as of Friday, according to the state’s health department.
Redditors on the atheism subReddit were enraged over the spreading of misinformation that led to claiming a child's life.
"Their remaining children should be taken from them immediately and they should NEVER be allowed to have kids again. How can someone even think, 'Oh, my kid DIED, that wasn't so bad'?!" wrote a user.
A second commenter couldn't believe the parents' stoic reaction to the tragic loss.
"I don't know how it 'isn't as bad as they make it out to be' when the kid died. These people have negative intelligence," wrote the user.
A third said:
"The side effects are worse than death? WTF.. being in a cult, being brainwashed… god planned for your child to die of a preventable disease….??? The cognitive dissonance is astounding!"
Many X (formerly Twitter) users called it as they saw it.
The father maintained that "measles are good for the body" and that contracting it helps boost the immune system, a theory that RFK Jr. mentioned on Fox News that remains questionable.
"There's a lot of studies out there that show that if you actually do get the wild infection, you're protected later."
"It boosts your immune system later in life against cancers, atopic diseases, cardiac disease, etc." He added, "It's not well-studied. It ought to be well-studied because we ought to understand those relationships."
Despite the loss of their daughter, the parents maintained that her passing was God's will.
The translator relayed what the father conveyed in low German:
“He says that God does no wrong and he wanted this to wake people up."
The full CHD interview with the grieving parents can be seen here.
Parents Of Child In Texas Measles Outbreak Deathlive.childrenshealthdefense.org
Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, where the child was treated, disputed the parents' claims about the disease and the treatment.
The hospital told the Huffington Post that the parents' statements in the interview contained “misleading and inaccurate claims regarding care provided at Covenant Children’s.”
While they were unable to provide specifics regarding the case due to patient confidentiality laws, the hospital stood by its healthcare 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 stated.
