Covering Measles for Mennonites

On February 25, a child died in Seminole, Texas, in a community of Mennonites. The cause was measles. John Dueck, the editor of Die Mennonitische Post—or the Mennonite Post, known to readers as the MPOST—reported that this was “the first death in the US from the highly contagious—but preventable—infectious disease since 2015.” The MPOST is produced under the umbrella of the Mennonite Central Committee Canada, or, more largely, the MCC, a nonprofit organization, by a small team of Paraguayan Mennonites living in Canada, who send it twenty-one times per year, by various means, to a little more than two thousand subscribers across the globe. Some of the MPOST’s readers, Dueck knew, would be wary of vaccination guidance. “Because of COVID and all that,” he told me, “there’s so many different reasons why they are anti-vaccine.” But also, “everybody is nervous,” he said. “Everybody is uncertain now.”