The media’s coverage of the West Texas measles outbreak shows it continues to view middle America through a condescending elitist lens and is scared to ask questions that could violate liberal doctrine on issues such as immigration and healthcare—even if asking those questions could save lives.

After taking the Oath of Office in 2017, President Donald Trump tweeted, “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People.”

The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017

CNN recently warned that Trump isn’t enacting an agenda as much as he’s overthrowing elite institutions, writing, “His attempt to bring universities, the media and the medical establishment into line is raising fears for academic and press freedom and the sanctity of science in public health.”

Sanctity?

The media has always leaned left. But this isn’t slant, it’s dogma borne from class anxiety and loyalty. Just as religious, sectarian newspapers don’t play both sides on established doctrine, the media doth not question established health dogma and giveth no quarter to heretics.

The media’s foul treatment of normal public skepticism, during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on unscientific health recommendations, illogical mandates, and rushed vaccines made even apolitical Americans realize Trump had a point. This dogma is tragically playing out again, this time with measles.

Not Your Grandfather’s Measles

America is experiencing the worst measles outbreak since the 1990s. By early March, cases tied to the West Texas outbreak already surpassed the number of U.S. cases last year. As of March 27, Texas and New Mexico have surpassed 370, and several connected cases have been detected in Oklahoma.

Dr. Richard Bartlett, who has treated many of the infected children, told the Highwire Podcast that when he arrived in Gaines County, Texas he found 108 infected patients in need of treatment.

“This is different than anything I ever read in the textbooks,” he said. “I was totally shocked. I think this is different than what my father endured when he was a child.”

It felt just like COVID did, where you saw people who had a highly contagious respiratory virus, and some of them were having coughing fits that wouldn’t stop and shortness of breath. They get a high fever as well with measles. And one of the complications you see is with febrile seizures, and some of the kids have had that. We’re seeing 106 degree fever.

Measles is the most contagious disease in the world transmitted between people. Before 1963, when the U.S. began administering the measles vaccine, it infected nearly every U.S. child before age 15. The disease can cause blindness, hearing loss, and terminal childhood dementia. Since 2000, when the country declared the disease eliminated, it only appeared sporadically, primarily from international travel.

The CDC warns that between 1 and 3 of every 1,000 measles-infected children will die from respiratory or neurological complications.

On Feb. 26, however, with less than 130 confirmed infections, a 6-year-old girl from Gaines County died from measles-induced pneumonia. This marked only the third measles-related death in the U.S. since 2003.

Bartlett added that if he and his friend Dr. Ben Edwards, an integrative medicine family practitioner in Lubbock, Texas hadn’t intervened on the ground, more children would have died. He told of one little girl who had an oxygen saturation level of 70 percent who recovered in a day after being administered supplemental oxygen and Budesenide, a steroid used to treat asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Bartlett emphasized the danger measles poses today, because few doctors have ever seen it. “In 34 years of practicing medicine, I’ve never seen or treated a case of measles,” he said.

Bartlett praised Health and Human Services Director Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s response to the tragic outbreak, noting he’s called doctors on the ground and spoken to parents, including the parents of the child who died. “You’ve never seen this before from our federal healthcare system, certainly not in my career,” he said. “RFK wants to know moment-by-moment what’s happening and is taking it very personal.”

(RELATED: It’s Time to Make America Healthy Again)

Mennonites Suffering the Worst

This outbreak spread primarily among the large, under-vaccinated population of Mennonites who live in Gaines County. Tina Siemens, who runs the local West Texas Living Heritage Museum, told Anabaptist World that “the Mennonite churches operate six private schools in the area, several with 200 to 300 students, and an equal number of Mennonite students attend public school. Homeschooling has become popular since the COVID pandemic.”

Steven Nolt, professor of history and Anabaptist Studies at Elizabethtown College, told the Texas Tribune that Mennonites have no official position on immunization, but many of their families have little interaction with health officials. Gaines County has the highest rate of unvaccinated school-aged children in Texas, at 14 percent.

He said Mennonites mass-vaccinated during the mid-20th century when vaccines became available. But most of Gaines County’s Mennonites “missed the whole mid-century immunization push, as they weren’t in the U.S. at that time.”

25-year-old Mennonite hairdresser Justina Harder told the Wall Street Journal, “As far as antivaccine Mennonites go, that seems to be kind of a New Age thing, like younger Mennonites, because most of the older Mennonites that I grew up with, they’re vaccinated, and they have nothing against it.”

Complicating matters for first responders, many of the adults have limited English comprehension, and many of the children understand no English. In an interview with Children’s Health Defense, which Kennedy led before becoming HHS Secretary, the parents of the deceased child had to rely on a translator at times.

The Media’s Bias is Going to Get People Killed

The media’s reporting on the West Texas measles outbreak goose steps through a tight playbook:

1) Vaccine skepticism caused this.

2) This comes right after vaccine critic RFK became HHS Secretary—as if he retroactively convinced hundreds of Mennonite parents in the 2010s not to vaccinate their toddlers.

And 3) Immigration had nothing to do with this.

The Atlantic even sent a reporter, who interviewed the grieving father of the deceased child in the parking lot of the church while his daughter lay inside in wake.

Like clockwork, Jeffrey Goldberg’s rag published the “tell-all” hit piece, not-so-subtly blaming the girl’s parents for her death.

NBC News health reporter Erika Edwards provides one of the more egregious examples of the media’s standard malpractice when reporting on rural suffering.

Recording a selfie short in Gaines County, she said, “The vast majority of those patients have been unvaccinated,” snidely adding, “and, actually, a large portion, I’ve noticed, are lining up at this building behind me to seek treatment for their measles cases in the forms of Vitamins A and C, despite a lack of scientific evidence they work to treat measles.”

The stage she set is clear. This is a West Texas version of Steve Martin’s Leap of Faith.

Dr. Edwards told Children’s Health Defense that he only intervened after the deceased child’s parents asked him for help. They and her four little siblings contracted the measles at her funeral and were naturally reticent to trust the hospital after watching their daughter and big sister deteriorate and die before their eyes. He noted the community itself set up the makeshift clinic.

Even if Erika Edwards were correct about “a lack of evidence” for using vitamin supplements to treat measles, who would fault parents of dying children for seeking treatment wherever available?

As Bartlett noted, “A lot of these people who are suffering in this outbreak, they live in rural areas. They are very disconnected from a hospital—it would take forever for an ambulance to find them.”

But Edwards is not correct about “a lack of scientific evidence.”

She cites a single doctor: Dr. Alexandra Yonts, an infectious disease specialist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., to whom NBC News attributes two quotes: 1) “Vitamin A in and of itself does not treat measles” and 2) “Most of us get enough Vitamin A, therefore taking any additional Vitamin A will unlikely give you any benefits against complications of measles.”

Neither of these statements addresses Vitamin C or claims definitively that vitamin A doesn’t help measles patients at all.

Edwards’ claim ignores multiple studies, including this one from the Cochrane Library, this one from the New England Journal of Medicine, this one in the International Journal of Epidemiology, and this one in The Lancet, which all state that two doses of Vitamin A reduce the risk of mortality in young children with measles.

This kind of agenda-driven behavior is dangerous. In a health crisis, people will die when the media suppresses information about empirically proven life-saving remedies just because the medical consensus hasn’t given its stamp of approval. The media also sacrifices their credibility with the masses. In a case like the measles, parents who should get their children vaccinated likely will not just because the Atlantic insists upon it.

Dr. Edwards recalled finding out about the little girl’s death.

I was being interviewed the day [the little girl] died… I was in the middle of an interview. I remember that reporter grabbing his phone, and the news alert just announced, “first measles death,” and there was almost a giddiness in his response. It was disgusting, actually.”

(RELATED: Will the Liberal Media Drop Partisan ProPublica?)

Why Isn’t the Media Curious Where the Outbreak Came from?

Investigating the origins of the West Texas measles outbreak inevitably implicates the Biden administration’s border and immigration policies, which would derail the mainstream media’s immigration agenda. It would also force them to step off their vaccination soapbox.

A cursory Google search of “Gaines County, where the outbreak originated” produces dozens of “mainstream” articles with that exact wording. These outlets show no interest in investigating how a disease the U.S. vanquished a quarter century ago found its way to a remote, sparsely populated county in West Texas.

Before COVID-19, the media reported more honestly on this. During a smaller measles outbreak in Clarke County, Washington, in 2019, ABC News reported, “The revelation that the ongoing measles outbreak is tied to a foreign individual does not come as a surprise to those who have studied the disease.”

Thanks to strict vaccination requirements to obtain visas, those who enter through traditional legal pathways almost never introduce eliminated diseases into the country, so measles normally spreads from Americans traveling abroad. But whether Americans catch measles from foreigners abroad or foreigners in the U.S., it almost always starts with foreigners.

A similar outbreak among an under-vaccinated population occurred in 2019, when one unvaccinated child returned home to New York City from Israel with the measles. Within the city’s under-vaccinated Orthodox Jewish community, it spread like wildfire, resulting in 649 confirmed cases, with 93 percent being among the Orthodox.

Why, then, is it so outlandish to assume this most recent outbreak didn’t come from abroad like nearly every other episode since 2000?

The CDC and the Texas Department of State Health Services told NBC News that genotype testing had linked this outbreak to a measles strain called D8 currently circulating in Europe and the Mediterranean region, which includes countries in North Africa, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia.”

America’s immigration health standards lapsed under Biden, who irresponsibly surged immigration to levels never before seen in the U.S.

His Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (CHNV) parole program alone flew a total of 30,000 would-be illegal border-crossers per month from these countries directly into the heartland for a two-year indentured servitude to American employers. In the final two years of his presidency, over 530,000 migrants entered through the CHNV program.

This resulted in a measles outbreak last year in Chicago, involving 57 cases associated with a shelter housing unvaccinated Venezuelan migrants.

Although measles vaccination rates in Cuba and Nicaragua are higher than America’s, Venezuela and Haiti rank near the bottom worldwide with rates of 68 percent and 65 percent, compared with the U.S. rate of 92 percent.

According to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, beneficiaries “have to attest to meeting public health requirements including vaccines, however there is no medical exam required to be granted CHNV parole.”

The millions of “refugees” allowed to cross the U.S. border under Biden also didn’t face the same strict vaccination requirements as normal immigrants. According to the CDC: “US-bound refugees are not required to receive vaccinations before arrival in the United States. Therefore, many may not be fully up to date with Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.”

The government also doesn’t require non-immigrant visitors to attest to vaccination, warning only that “some visa applicants are required to undergo a medical examination with an authorized physician to assess visa eligibility” (emphasis added). The foreigner, referred to as “patient zero,” in the 2019 Washington case was a non-immigrant visitor.

In an op-ed in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Terri Burke, Executive Director of The Immunization Project, claims that by securing the border to protect Americans from foreign diseases, President Donald Trump “is demagoguing brown people, when the real disease threat is coming from countries dominated by white people and from people in our own country who are refusing to vaccinate their own children.”

She argues the West Texas outbreak couldn’t have come from immigrants or lax border enforcement, because “there is no evidence that the folks from the South Plains have ever been at the border or close to newly arrived immigrants.”

She assumes the Mennonites, in their sedentary time warp, don’t travel abroad and live in an area that wouldn’t appeal to immigrants.

But Mennonites have traditionally been a mobile people. The Gaines County Mennonites have continuously arrived from Chihuahua, Mexico since the late 1970s, and many use Spanish to communicate with non-Mennonite neighbors. Siemens said that today only half are U.S. citizens.

The Mennonite community in Chihuahua recently experienced measles cases from Gaines County residents visiting family there. It’s not inconceivable it could have initially spread in the other direction. When a Mexican YouTuber asked a Mennonite restaurant owner in Chihuahua what Mennonites there do for leisure, he replied that they “travel a lot.”

But frequent border crossings wouldn’t require measles to spread between Mennonites, as they would have come within spitting distance of hundreds of non-immigrant visitors and “refugees.”

Contrary to Burke’s ignorance, Gaines County is also no stranger to illegal aliens. The official population of Seminole, its county seat, is 7,000, but locals told the Free Press it’s likely more than double that because of all the illegal aliens present.

As Siemens mentioned, only about half of Gaines County’s Mennonites are citizens. She added, “the others seek legal status.” But that’s not true for all the others.

The Free Press interviewed a multimillionaire illegal alien in Seminole who thinks Americans depend on illegal aliens like himself to maintain their standard of living. Born in Bolivia to Mennonite parents, he overstayed his visitor visa in 2007 and was promptly deported. That didn’t stop him from getting another visitor visa a few days later, and the border officer “didn’t bat an eye” when he told him he was “going home to Seminole.”

John Peters, an anchor baby born to Mexican citizens, who were living in the U.S. illegally, runs a consulting business in Seminole to get permits for foreign farm workers. He told The Free Press the market for his services is expanding, because “Mennonites are still coming to West Texas.” He said in just the past year, a wave of roughly 1,500 of them came from Bolivia alone.

The Canadian Connection

Canada is also experiencing the worst measles outbreak since it achieved elimination status. The country’s outbreak originated with a traveler from the Philippines, who spread it to New Brunswick last October. By late February, Ontario’s 2025 number of cases surpassed  the province’s total between 2013 and 2023. As of March 27, there have been 572 confirmed cases—ten times worse than the West Texas outbreak per capita. However, the media doesn’t cover it as much, likely because there is no Canadian RFK to try to take down.

This matters, because Gaines County’s immigrant-swollen communities aren’t just being replenished from south of the border.

The Free Press told the story of an illegal alien named Micheal, a Canadian Mennonite, who crossed the border illegally during COVID-19. At the time, the government only allowed commercial traffic, so he decided to “import” his tools. “It was the easiest crossing of my life,” he bragged.

His landscaping business now employs around 10 people, all of whom are migrant “refugees” or CHNV “parolees.”

Michael likely isn’t alone. The Chihuahuan Mennonite community originally came from Manitoba in the 1920s. Just as Gaines County Mennonites maintain ties with their Mexican relations, they likely retain ties to many of the 175,000 Mennonites in Canada.

The official Manitoba government website notes that one of the outbreaks sites was the Reinland Mennonite Church, on Jan. 26, three days before the first hospitalizations occurred in Lubbock, Texas.

On March 7, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. Kiernan Moore, sent a letter to Ontario’s health units, stating that Mennonites unwittingly carried measles back to Ontario after “an exposure at a large gathering with guests from Mennonite communities in New Brunswick last fall.”

In a public health crisis, Americans can’t trust their media not to politicize every crisis—even every tragedy—and blindly defend the elite’s consensus. The media behaves this way, not out of genuine concern for public safety, but because it truly is the enemy of the people. The elitists who run these outlets and direct their narratives view ordinary people—especially deeply religious people—as barely removed from the Middle Ages in understanding of science, technology, and the world outside their rural enclaves.

Just as adults repeat themselves to children, the media repeats narratives—i.e., vaccines are safe and effective, there’s no evidence natural remedies help people recover, immigrants do not bring diseases—as if repetition alone can disabuse readers of “fearmongering” notions that immigrants and foreign visitors could reintroduce a domestically-eliminated disease.

COVID-19 showed the media’s agenda doesn’t include delivering relevant, helpful information to the public, even if doing so could save lives. Rather than learn from the public mistrust they engendered, media elites continue to hobble on life support from tax subsidies and left-wing billionaires’ ideologically driven “charity,” solely to perpetuate their toxic codependency.