‘I feel like I’ve been lied to’: When a measles outbreak hits home
BROWNFIELD, Texas – He was a chiropractor by training, but in a remote part of west Texas with limited medical care, Kiley Timmons had become a first stop for whatever hurt. For more than a decade, Kiley, 48, had seen 20 patients each day at his small clinic located between a church and a gas station in Brownfield, population 8,500. He treated what he could, referred others to physicians and prayed over the rest.
It wasn’t until early this spring that he started to notice something unfamiliar coming through the door: aches that lingered, fevers that wouldn’t break, discolored patches of skin that didn’t make sense. At first, he blamed it on a bad flu season, but the symptoms stuck around and then multiplied. By late March, a third of his patients were telling him about relatives who couldn’t breathe. And then Kiley started coughing, too.
His wife, Carrollyn, had recently tested positive for COVID, but her symptoms eased as Kiley’s intensified. He went to a doctor at the beginning of April for a viral panel, but every result came back negative. The doctor decided to test for the remote possibility of measles, since there was a large outbreak spreading through a Mennonite community 40 miles away, but Kiley was vaccinated.
“I feel like I’m dying,” Kiley texted a friend. He couldn’t hold down food or water. He had already lost 10 pounds. His chest went numb, and his arms began to tingle. His oxygen was dropping dangerously low when he finally got the results.
“Positive for measles,” he wrote to his sister in mid-April. “Just miserable. I can’t believe this.”
Twenty-five years after measles was officially declared eliminated from the United States, this spring marked a harrowing time of rediscovery. A cluster of cases that began at a Mennonite church in west Texas expanded into one of the largest outbreaks in a generation, spreading through communities with declining vaccination rates as three people died and dozens more were hospitalized from Mexico to North Dakota. Public health officials tracked about 1,200 confirmed cases and countless exposures across more than 30 states.
But what frightened Kiley more than the potential spread was the severity of the disease: About 1 in 5 unvaccinated people with measles will be hospitalized, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As many as 1 in 20 children contracts a secondary pneumonia infection. More than 1 in 1,000 dies. Measles stops spreading when 95% of a community is immune, but national vaccination rates for children have fallen to less than 92%. In parts of west Texas, they have dropped below 80%.
Kiley’s business catered in part to patients who were skeptical of mainstream U.S. health care and wanted to try alternative treatments. “The doctor of the future will give no medicine,” read one sign that he hung in his office.
“I feel like I’ve been lied to,” Kiley told his wife as his fever rose to 104 degrees.
He tried to manage his symptoms at home with cod liver oil and vitamin D, supplements endorsed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. health secretary. He isolated himself in the living room to avoid infecting his four children.
One morning about a week into his illness, Carrollyn walked into the living room and saw Kiley lying on the couch. His head was almost purple. A rash was blooming across his chest, and his mouth was dotted with dozens of white sores. She tested his oxygen level. It read 85% – low enough to endanger his vital organs. She drove him to the emergency room, where he was quarantined and given oxygen, breathing treatments and X-rays to monitor his stomach cramps.
He stayed in isolation for the next 40 hours, too sick to rest and too exhausted to talk, until he rolled over and saw a new message on his phone, from Carrollyn.
“Update on the kids,” she said in the second week of April. “Three of them have fevers.”
For more than a decade, Kiley and Carrollyn had debated whether to vaccinate their children.
Each time, they decided against it.
The vaccine was considered safe and 97% effective by the Food and Drug Administration. For generations, every credible American health official had recommended the MMR vaccine, to prevent measles, mumps and rubella, as a basic obligation to society. Almost all parents in Texas had consented to the recommended two doses for their children, effectively eliminating measles transmission within the United States.
But that success also meant the disease had gradually become an abstraction, a distant threat. Only three Americans had died of measles since 2000, and Kennedy rose to political prominence as a vaccine skeptic. He testified to Congress about the risk of rare vaccine injuries and later fired all 17 experts on a vaccine advisory panel.
In recent years, as many as 15% of families in west Texas school districts had applied for “conscientious exemptions” from the MMR vaccine. What Carrollyn feared more than measles was the remote possibility that her children might experience an adverse reaction to the shots. Two of her younger siblings had been vaccinated and had then suffered from high fevers that led to febrile seizures – scary convulsions that lasted several minutes but didn’t cause permanent damage.
“My children won’t see this disease in their lifetimes,” she always concluded. “The vaccine would probably be fine, but why take an unnecessary risk?”
She worked to safeguard the children in other ways when she first heard about the cluster of cases in nearby Gaines County. Carrollyn stopped taking the children to the grocery store and stocked up on immune supplements. She and Kiley talked again about the possibility of vaccinating – and landed on the same decision. The children were young, healthy, strong. Maybe they still wouldn’t get it.
Arden, 9, was the first to spike a fever, and it continued for 13 days. Then Garner, 12, started throwing up. By the time Kiley was sent home from the hospital, their 14-year-old twins, Hudson and Tucker, were also declining.
Hudson’s oxygen levels started to crash on Easter weekend. Carrollyn dialed 911. A few minutes later, she was riding with Hudson in the back of an ambulance on the way to Lubbock, 45 minutes away.
All four children were eventually admitted to the hospital and quarantined.
It took three days before all of them were stable enough to return home, and even then, their recovery wasn’t complete. Kiley continued to suffer from temporary hair loss, brain fog and short-term memory deficits. The children had cluster headaches. And then came a new wave of symptoms: eye sores, muscle aches and colds from what seemed like a new round of viruses. Kiley researched online and read that measles can cause a condition called “immune amnesia,” leaving the body vulnerable to all kinds of other infections for months or even years.
Ben Edwards had never seen a measles case until earlier this year, but he had helped vaccinate hundreds of children against the virus as a doctor in rural Garza County, Texas.
But in 2011, Edwards experienced what he called a “divine appointment” and began questioning the core tenets of American medicine. He came to believe his patients weren’t suffering from diseases so much as experiencing symptoms of bad diets and societal rot, and that the human body was almost always capable of healing itself with hydration, movement, nutritious foods and spiritual peace. He moved to Lubbock and started his own practice, Veritas Medical, named after the Latin word for truth. He began selling supplements and started a weekly podcast, “You’re the Cure,” on which he often hosted guests who questioned the safety of vaccines.
His new practice filled with hundreds of patients who shared his disillusionment with mainstream medicine, including a few dozen Mennonites who lived an hour from Lubbock. One of them, Tina Siemens, called Edwards in early March and asked if he could attend the viewing of a child who had just died of complications from measles – the first American death from the disease in more than a decade.
Edwards loaded his pickup truck with supplements and drove to a small church outside Seminole, Texas. A 6-year-old girl with braided pigtails was lying in a coffin. Her four young siblings sat nearby, flushed with fevers, rashes and coughs.
Their parents were afraid to take them to the hospital, where their daughter had died a few days earlier in the intensive care unit. There is no antiviral treatment or cure for measles, so Edwards offered the children supportive care in the form of hydration, immune supplements and cod liver oil rich with vitamin A, which the World Health Organization recommends in some cases.
Edwards sat with the family and watched as more Mennonites rotated through the viewing, including many unvaccinated children with rashes and high fevers.
Over the next several weeks, Edwards made home visits and cared for as many as 300 people with measles, continuing to see patients even as he suffered a mild breakthrough infection and developed a rash himself.
All the while, Edwards continued to release his weekly podcast, hosting a rotation of authors, doctors and activists who minimized the danger of measles and spoke instead about the benefits of being unvaccinated and the risks of rare vaccine injuries.
“The body’s designed to kill measles,” Edwards said as it spread into New Mexico and Oklahoma.
“I would encourage you to seek a higher authority, a spiritual authority, and let peace guide you,” he said as the disease stretched into Kansas and Nebraska.
“Don’t be scared of anything,” he said when the total number of reported measles cases rose above 1,000, almost all among people who were unvaccinated, as the virus continued to spread in Colorado, Pennsylvania and finally into the remote corners of North Dakota, arriving in the state for the first time in 14 years.