Texas measles outbreak draws attention to traditionalist Mennonite community

The first fatality linked to measles in the United States in a decade is an unvaccinated 6-year-old girl from one of 13 Mennonite churches in the Seminole, Texas, area.

The Texas Department of State Health Services announced the death on Feb. 26. The child has not been identified in the media.

A measles outbreak in Gaines County, Texas, in February brought international attention to the traditionalist Mennonite community, where many parents are reluctant to vaccinate their children against measles. But they’re not alone. About 17% of the children in Seminole-area public schools are unvaccinated.

“COVID really plummeted the trust in our medical facilities,” Tina Siemens of Seminole told Anabaptist World. Siemens operates the West Texas Living Heritage Museum, which focuses on the local Mennonite community. She has become a source for many news outlets because the local conservative Mennonites are reluctant to talk to the media.

“Because we have a number of vaccine injuries in our community, if they [Mennonite families] see what happened, they will say, ‘Based on that and my research, I will not do that [get children vaccinated],’ ” Siemens said.

Some local Mennonites believe the scientifically discredited claim that vaccinations cause autism. Many avoid doctors and prefer home remedies to deal with health issues. Others, although Siemens suspects a small number, are choosing to vaccinate their children.

A reporter for The Atlantic talked to the father of the girl who died from complications of pneumonia after contracting measles. The father, identified only as Peter, said Mennonites were unjustly singled out and not the only ones who came down with measles.

“The vaccination has stuff we don’t trust,” Peter told The Atlantic. “We don’t like the vaccinations, what they have these days.” And there is also God’s will. “Everybody has to die,” he said.

Dave Klassen, senior pastor at Community Church of Seminole, identified by the Associated Press and The Texas Tribune as a “mostly Mennonite congregation,” told the AP and the Tribune he wouldn’t presume to give advice about vaccines.

“Do I trust all the vaccines? No,” Klassen said. “And I get from [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] that he doesn’t trust all the vaccines, either. And he is very well educated in that; I’m not.”

Siemens said Kennedy, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, called her twice.

“He wanted background on the Mennonites in Seminole,” Siemens said.

A child hangs a stuffed animal on his back as elders pray for Johnny Dyck as he is ordained as a pastor during a service at Community Church of Seminole, Texas, on Feb. 23. — Julio Cortez/AP

Amish schools lose appeal for religious exemption in New York

The rapid spread of measles in Texas and reports of cases in at least 12 other states coincided with an appeals court ruling involving private Amish schools in New York.

A three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals’ Second Circuit dismissed an appeal on March 3 from three men and three schools claiming the state’s 2019 repeal of a religious exemption for school immunization requirements violated their religious freedom.

Joseph Miller, Ezra Wengerd and Jonas Smucker had sued New York health and education leaders claiming that their private schools were sufficiently separate from the wider community, and a requirement to immunize their children violated their freedoms under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. They cited the Supreme Court’s 1972 Wisconsin v. Yoder ruling giving Amish people religious freedom to not send their children to public schools after the age of 16.

The judges wrote that reintroducing religious exemptions for vaccine mandates would “cut directly against” the state’s interest in protecting public health. The judges agreed that vaccine mandates burden Amish religious beliefs and practices but disagreed with the Amish plaintiffs’ claims that such mandates pose an existential threat equivalent to the educational requirements Amish faced in Wisconsin v. Yoder.

The judges quoted the Supreme Court’s 1944 Prince v. Massachusetts ruling, stating a parent “cannot claim freedom from compulsory vaccination for the child more than for himself on religious grounds” because the “right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or the child to communicable disease or the latter to ill health or death.” — Anabaptist World

She helped local health officials by translating information about free vaccines into Low German, the language spoken by local Mennonites. She is also active in facilitating distribution of donated vitamins and steroids for families seeking alternative treatments to vaccines.

The Seminole Anabaptist community includes many Old Colony Mennonites who began settling in there in the 1970s. They came from Mexico, their home since leaving Canada in the 1920s, seeking freedom to run their own schools. The community has a population of about 35,000.

Siemens said the Mennonite churches operate six private schools in the area, several with 200 to 300 students, and an equal number of Mennonite students attend public school. Homeschooling has become popular since the COVID pandemic.

Local Mennonites “are technologically advanced, winning awards for their modern farming methods,” Siemens said. Many own businesses in Seminole, selling farm equipment, running lumber yards, health-food stores, automobile garages and others. About half are U.S. citizens, she said, and the others seek legal status.

Texas law allows schoolchildren to get an exemption from vaccines for reasons of conscience. But “no pastors are telling them not to get vaccinated,” Siemens said.

She said she had “heard from two moms that went to their friends to have them play together to just have it [getting measles] done with.”

Die Mennonitische Post, a German-language newspaper serving Mennonites throughout the Americas, included a letter in its Feb. 21 edition, written by Johann and Katharina Neustädter of Seminole, that reported “there are a lot of sick people here. Many have fever or diarrhea, vomiting or measles. Also headaches and colds. That’s not good.”

The situation is not limited to the U.S. On March 12 in Mexico, health authorities confirmed 15 measles cases in the Mennonite colonies north of Cuauhtémoc in Chihuahua. Health officials attributed the cases to a family who visited relatives in Texas.

Tim Huber and John Longhurst contributed to this report.