A child’s death brings anti-vaccine activists to town
Kayley Fehr, just 6 years old, had a big family with two brothers and two sisters. According to her obituary, she had a talent for singing and loved to make people laugh. Tragically, she was unvaccinated.
She contracted measles around the same time as her four siblings. As her fever climbed, she struggled to breathe and became increasingly fatigued. Doctors provided her with Tylenol and medication for her cough, yet she continued to have difficulties catching her breath and couldn’t eat due to sores in her mouth.
Kayley’s parents took her to Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, where she was quickly diagnosed with pneumonia and admitted to the ICU. Sadly, her condition deteriorated rapidly. In her final moments, she was too weak to communicate, her breathing shallow, and her mouth dry from thirst. Eventually, she was sedated, intubated, and placed on a ventilator.
The circumstances surrounding Kayley’s passing were revealed weeks later when her parents provided an interview with Children’s Health Defense. Emotionally, they recounted their heart-wrenching loss through an interpreter.
That interview marked a shift in the narrative. Following Kayley’s death, Children’s Health Defense adapted their message, echoing sentiments they had previously used during earlier outbreaks and had honed during the Covid crisis: they claimed Kayley died with measles, not from it, suggesting that the virus was incidental to her death and that another condition was the real culprit. To amplify this message, they felt they needed an authoritative voice—a doctor.
Ben Edwards had a conventional family medicine practice in a small clinic in Post, Texas, but around 2013, he began to lose faith in traditional medicine after becoming influenced by a holistic doctor from Amarillo. This practitioner dismissed the germ theory, espousing the idea that a person’s constitution determines their susceptibility to illness.
Edwards’s new mentor, who had lost his medical license and was deemed dangerous by the Texas Medical Board, focused on nutrition and lifestyle coaching while offering unconventional remedies like ketamine to “cure” autism. When Edwards attempted to apply these new beliefs, he was let go from the county clinic. Feeling liberated, he pursued his vision independently.
Fast forward over a decade, Edwards operates a modern, cash-only clinic in downtown Lubbock, complete with a soothing waterfall in the lobby, an area for IV treatments, and a podcast studio for “You’re the Cure.”
Kayley’s death triggered a cascade of events that brought Edwards and later Children’s Health Defense to Seminole.
At the end of February, Edwards received a call from Tina Siemens, one of his first patients and known as “the bridge” between the local Mennonite community and outsiders. Siemens, who runs a small Mennonite history museum, had previously assisted local authorities in translating vaccination information into Low German. Now, she informed Edwards that Kayley’s parents were worried about their other children, who were still suffering from measles.
