We have a virus stalking America and we aren’t really talking about it (NYT gift link):
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. Ear infections. Labor pains. Oil workers who arrived with broken ribs and farmers with bulging discs. 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.”
[…]
But what frightened Kiley more than the potential spread was the severity of the disease: About one in five unvaccinated people with measles will be hospitalized, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As many as one in 20 children contracts a secondary pneumonia infection. More than one in 1,000 dies.
Maybe I’m out of it but I haven’t heard before that the measles outbreak we are experiencing is so much more severe. And guess what?
Measles stops spreading when 95 percent of a community is immune, but national vaccination rates for children have fallen to less than 92 percent. In parts of West Texas, they’ve dropped below 80.
They believed snake oil salesmen and faith healers:
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 and coughed and dry-heaved his way through the night.
“I’m just trying to breathe at the moment,” he texted one relative.
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 percent — low enough to endanger his vital organs. She tucked the monitor away to keep Kiley from panicking. He was hazy and confused, so she helped him into a fresh shirt and 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.
It was about their kids. Read the whole thing to see the horror they visited them because they refused to vaccinate. Let’s just say it’s not the fun and games Bobby Jr describes at Hickory Hill when he was a kid with measles. They were hospitalized and almost died. And now they’re left with ongoing illnesses caused by what’s known as measles “immune amnesia.”
The article goes on to chronicle the experience of a different religious fanatic doctor and “wellness” weirdo who believes, as does our HHS Secretary, that measles and other diseases are all the result of poor diet and spiritual rot. He observed a whole bunch of kids getting much sicker than he’d been led to believe in the textbooks that measles would bring but it didn’t change his mind. He just kept praying and giving them cod liver oil.
This would be a nightmare in any case. But now that we’ve got the U.S. Government promoting this throwback, medieval bullshit it’s becoming a serious crisis.