Thus far, there’s only been one confirmed death in the measles outbreak spreading across North America — and the father of the unvaccinated child who died of the preventable disease is expressing no regrets about failing to get her the jab. In a startling interview with The Atlantic, the father of the six-year-old girl who became the first measles death in the United States in 10 years discussed the beliefs that led up to her dying from an infectious disease that was essentially eradicated at the turn of the last century. Identified only as Peter, the father at the heart of this tragedy is, like many others in Seminole, the small West Texas town at the center of the outbreak, a member of the traditional-minded Christian sect known as Mennonites. There’s apparently nothing in that group’s doctrine barring modern medicine, but like many other conservative religious groups, many Mennonites are vaccine skeptics.
“The vaccination has stuff we don’t trust,” Peter told The Atlantic. “We don’t like the vaccinations, what they have these days. We heard too much, and we saw too much.” Peter insists that measles is a normal part of life — although for much of the country, it is not, and hasn’t been for decades in the wake of generations of successful vaccination campaigns against measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR). “Everybody has it,” the man told the magazine. “It’s not so new for us.” Those comments echo claims made by new Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who said during president Donald Trump’s first televised cabinet meeting at the end of February that it was “not unusual” for measles cases to spike from time to time.
“We have measles outbreaks every year,” the political scion claimed — a claim that is only true now because anti-vaxxers like him and the group he used to lead have made people afraid to get them for fear of “injury” from these proven-safe inoculations. Though Kennedy has since changed his tune under increased scrutiny to handle the outbreak taking place on his watch, the father of the six-year-old girl claimed by the disease has not. “Everybody has to die,” he told The Atlantic’s Tom Bartlett.
Still, Peter appeared to become emotional after that admission, telling the columnist that it was “very hard” to deal with the “big hole” in his life resulting from the loss of his young child. It’s impossible to imagine what the man is going through — if only because it seems cruel to hold onto such regressive beliefs in the face of unnecessary death.
