This Texas Mennonite couple are still as strongly opposed to vaccination as they were before their little girl died. Cue the ghouls at Robert Kennedy Jr's Children's Health Defense to swoop in and use them for a 50-minute video on the dangers of vaccination.

The couple were adamant they would never take the MMR vaccine, and that "the measles wasn’t that bad" for their other four children who did not die.

Source: Mother Jones

Late last week, two Children’s Health Defense staffers, chief scientific officer Brian Hooker and Polly Tommey, the group’s director of programming for its video division, travelled to the west Texas region where the outbreak is most widespread. There, they filmed a conversation with the parents of the unvaccinated six-year-old child who had died of the highly contagious viral disease a few weeks earlier. The young couple, members of the Mennonite community, attributed their other four children’s mild cases of measles to treatments they received from Veritas Wellness.

This week, Children’s Health Defense aired the video of Hooker and Tommey’s conversation with the parents. The harrowing interview could reasonably be interpreted as a strong case in favor of measles vaccination—had she received the MMR immunization, the child would likely still be alive. But stunningly, the anti-vaccine activists see in the parents’ story a very different message: that shots are unnecessary as long as measles patients have access to untested treatments.

When asked whether they would get the vaccine now that one of their five children who got measles has died, the couple were adamant they would not, instead opting for the quackery of cocktails of steroids, antibiotics, vitamins, and cod liver oil that Edwards and the CHD promote to minimize the effects of measles.

Do you still feel the same way about the MMR vaccine versus measles and the proper treatment with Dr Ben Edwards?”

The mother did not hesitate. “Absolutely not take the MMR [vaccine],” she said. “The measles wasn’t that bad. [The other children] got over it pretty quickly. And Dr. Edwards was there for us.”

The problem with this absurd rationalization for their suspect behavior is that, while in the majority of cases the effects of measles are mild, complications from measles are relatively high, and "long-term complications, ranging from lung problems resulting from pneumonia to a rare fatal neurological syndrome, can occur years after recovery." Measles is not something you want to trifle with or get at all.

Dr. Pedro Piedra, a pediatric infections disease specialist at Baylor University College of Medicine in Texas, notes that about one in 20 develop pneumonia, and 1-3 out of every 1,000 children with measles will die from complications of the disease.

Their placebo medicines may assuage their guilt but it did nothing to protect their children now or in the future. If it were up to me, I'd charge them with reckless endangerment but that's not how Texas operates or most areas of the United States. Land of the Free-to kill your own kids.