The measles outbreak underway across West Texas and New Mexico has intensified, sickening 228 people, and killing two, a child and an adult. Amid the worsening public health emergency, a local historian in Seminole, Texas, Tina Siemens, has been helping a holistic medicine clinic raise money to distribute unproven remedies to families affected by the outbreak.
The same activist told Mother Jones that she had a phone call last week with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to understand the unique health challenges in the Mennonite community.
Siemens said she had been working with a clinic called Veritas in Lubbock, Texas, to distribute medications, including Vitamin C, cod liver oil, and the inhaled steroid budesonide. Last week, an online fundraiser appeared to collect donations that it says will be “used to defray the cost of essential vitamins, supplements, and medicines necessary to treat children enduring complications from the measles virus and other illnesses.” The fundraiser’s website says the funds will go to Tina Siemens and it lists its creator as Brian Hooker, a biologist and the chief scientific officer of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine advocacy group that Kennedy helmed until he ran for president.
On March 2, Kennedy penned an op-ed for Fox News in which he appeared to endorse the measles vaccines, writing that the shots “not only protect individual children from measles but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.” Yet in an interview last week, Kennedy claimed, without citing research, that treating measles with steroids, antibiotics, and cod liver oil yielded “very, very good results.” Cod liver oil contains Vitamin A, which is often used in much higher concentrations to prevent complications from the disease, including blindness. There is no credible evidence that cod liver oil itself can treat or prevent measles.
Neither the US Department of Health and Human Services nor Veritas immediately responded to a request for comment for this story.
Siemens told Mother Jones she had been motivated to help in part because she believed that local Mennonite families had been unfairly blamed for causing the outbreak because some of them chose not to vaccinate their children against measles.
She said that she had had a phone call last week with Kennedy and Veritas’ Dr. Edwards, and that the topic of the phone call had been “to understand the Mennonite culture,” which, she said, was important “because Mennonites have typically gotten the blame” for spreading the illness. She noted that not all of the local Mennonite families had skipped the vaccination. “The media is spinning it as it’s all the unvaccinated, uneducated Mennonites, and that’s just not the truth,” she said.
Veritas sells supplements and offers services including “peace consultation,” “movement consultations,” and a “menu” of medications and supplements it can deliver intravenously. According to the website, Dr. Edwards opened the clinic when “a divine appointment in 2011 opened his eyes to the fact that US medical schools only teach a very narrow way of disease and symptom management with pharmaceuticals instead of disease and symptom resolution by addressing root causes.”
The online fundraiser has collected more than $12,000 in donations so far. Siemens said that she had already helped Dr. Edwards to distribute medications to “150 to 200 families,” and that she was glad that people in the community had the choice of whether or not to receive the vaccine. “I’m very, very grateful that we live in a community that has that choice,” Siemens said. “We live in a state that has that choice, for the parents to make that choice for their family.”
