This Texas Family Was Part of the Biggest U.S. Measles Outbreak in a Generation

After the coughing fits, the head-to-toe body aches, the chest pains that felt similar to a heart attack, the relentless nausea, the fevers of 105, the 911 calls, the sleepless hospital nights and then the long weeks of what doctors termed “healing” — unexplained rashes, chronic fatigue, brain fog, more coughing fits — Kiley Timmons and his family eventually made a full recovery from the measles. The West Texas family was at the heart of the biggest outbreak in a generation last spring, with five family members hospitalized for their symptoms, including four unvaccinated children who were treated in a Lubbock hospital during the same week.

Now the twin boys are back to playing on the high school baseball team. The youngest daughter, 9, is performing in “The Nutcracker.” The entire family has returned to the rhythms of school and church, where they often see the controversial doctor who helped treat them, Ben Edwards, a prominent vaccine skeptic who aligned himself during the outbreak with Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.

Edwards treated hundreds of children for measles with cod liver oil and vitamin A at a makeshift clinic over the last year, seeing some patients while he was infected himself. He was recently honored for his work by an anti-vaccine advocacy group, the Children’s Health Defense, which named Edwards its Defender of the Year.

“It’s been a pretty happy ending to a very scary story,” said Carrollyn Timmons, who was vaccinated against the measles as a child and stayed healthy while her husband and four children fell sick. “It took everyone a few months to start feeling like themselves again, but I finally feel confident saying it’s behind us.”

What continues is the outbreak itself, which began in a Mennonite community outside of Lubbock and spread across the country over the last 11 months. There have now been almost 2,000 measles cases and three deaths in the United States this year. If the virus continues to spread into late January, the United States will lose its official status as a country that eliminated the measles, which it attained 25 years ago.

More than 90 percent of cases in the last year were among people who were unvaccinated — and that vulnerable population continues to grow. In Texas, the vaccination rate among kindergartners dropped to 93 percent this fall, the lowest number in 15 years. Thousands more people each year are making the same calculations as the Timmons family: filing for “conscientious exemptions” to vaccine mandates as they weigh the infinitesimal risk of vaccine injury against the realities of the disease.

“It’s a decision we thought long and hard about,” Carrollyn Timmons said. “Some people call us the ‘Measles Family’ now. I guess you could say our kids earned their immunity the hard way.”

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