How measles tore through a remote West Texas city

Anti-vaccine activists seized on a measles outbreak in Seminole, Texas, and turned the small Mennonite city into a battleground between fringe doctors and mainstream medicine.

SEMINOLE, Texas — On a Saturday in mid-March, Dr. Ben Edwards put on his scrubs and drove to a sheet metal building in this tiny West Texas city to treat children with measles. Red spots mottled his face; Edwards was sick with measles, too.

An outbreak of the disease was swelling in Gaines County, a rural community with one of the lowest childhood vaccination rates in the country. For two weeks, lines of families had snaked around the building’s dusty parking lot, almost all belonging to the area’s Mennonite community, a religious group known to speak Low German and keep to themselves, mostly sending their children to church-run schools. The parents were concerned by the illness that had speckled their children’s bodies and weakened their breathing, but their distrust of vaccines and hospitals ran deeper. Edwards’ alternatives seemed a safer bet.

Hastily repurposed from general store to clinic, the space Edwards worked in held little besides folding tables, plastic chairs and boxes of vitamins and supplements flown in by private plane. Feverish children coughed and whimpered. A flushed baby lay in his mother’s arms. Another child curled under a blanket on her mother’s lap. A crew from the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense documented it all.

Seminole is in the heart of Gaines County, known for its cotton and peanut crops.Shelby Tauber for NBC NewsAn empty building would serve as Edwards' makeshift clinic.Erika Edwards / NBC NewsEdwards handed out cod liver oil — pungent liquids and pills rich in vitamins A and D — and prescribed steroid inhalers. Neither treatment can prevent or cure measles, and medical associations have warned against them; Edwards said he had seen the therapies “work beautifully.”

“They had nowhere else to turn,” Edwards said later on his podcast, defending his decision to run the children’s clinic while he was contagious.