Texas Parents, Doctors Say Measles Didn’t Kill Six-Year-Old Girl

By Paul Bond, Contributing Writer, The Kennedy Beacon

The parents of the six-year-old girl who died at a hospital in Lubbock, Texas, asserted that measles didn’t kill their daughter as she also had pneumonia, and doctors who reviewed the medical records concur.

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Speaking publicly for the first time on Saturday — sometimes with the help of a German translator — the parents also said that their daughter was denied breathing treatments and life support.

On February 26, the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS), announced the “first death from measles in the ongoing outbreak in the South Plains and Panhandle regions,” though the parents said they are still awaiting a death certificate and an official cause of death.

And on Wednesday, Dr. Pierre Kory, whose specialties include reviewing medical cases for malpractice lawyers, said the girl “did not die of measles by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, she died of pneumonia.”

Kory reviewed the hospital records along with Dr. Ben Edwards, who is the physician treating the deceased child’s four siblings, and Brian Hooker, Chief Scientific Officer of Children’s Health Defense, and spoke of their findings Wednesday on CHD.TV.

“It gets worse than that,” Kory said, “because she didn’t really die of the pneumonia; she died of a medical error, and that error was a completely inappropriate antibiotic. It was an insufficient antibiotic.”

[A portion of Dr. Kory’s interview on CHD.TV was posted on and then removed from Instagram, owned by Meta.]

The child’s measles were disappearing by the time she entered the hospital a few days prior to her death, and doctors quickly diagnosed her with pneumonia.

“She died of mycoplasma, and the tragedy is that mycoplasma is an extremely common, what we call, ‘community acquired organism.’ This is very commonly circulating in the community, It causes pneumonia,” Kory said.

The child’s passing set off a media firestorm. Some unvaccinated Mennonites are being blamed for spreading measles, and the DSHS is advising MMR vaccines for the populace.

The Kennedy Beacon asked the DSHS to respond to Kory’s analysis of the medical records, but has not received a response.

Kory said that doctors should have put the child on antibiotics that would cover the most common organism, in this case, ceftriaxone, which they did, but also something from a macrolide or a quinolone category, the most common being azithromycin, which they did not.

Instead, he said, the doctors added vancomycin, which covers drug resistant organisms like MRSA. “There’s no reason to think that this child would come in with MRSA” from the Mennonite community, he asserted.

“It’s a grievous error, and it’s an error which led to her death,” he said.

Kory added that, since the girl was not getting better with the treatments she was receiving, hospital doctors should have tried something different, which they eventually did, though too late.

“When they realized that they were missing the appropriate antibiotic, it took them, as far as I can tell, 10 hours to administer it,” Kory said. “And, by that time, she was already on a ventilator … Less than 24 hours later, she died.”

Kory said the records show that the girl was in a state of shock, her blood pressure crashed and she arrested, adding: “I can only surmise that she died of catastrophic pulmonary embolism.”

He also said that bacterial pneumonia can happen after any viral infection, not just measles.

“You see the media is going nuts about how everyone needs to get vaccinated,” Kory noted. “ I would tell you just simple, straightforward, correct medical care — we’ve been treating pneumonia for decades with antibiotics, and this was just a tragic error.”

“It doesn’t look like doctoring at all,” added Hooker, “She passed away from medical error.”

Wednesday’s interview with Kory follows CHD.TV’s earlier interview with the deceased child’s parents, who offered details of their daughter’s final days.

The child’s mom explained that her daughter developed measles on a Saturday and she took her to a doctor the following Monday, when she was given cough medicine and told to use Tylenol for the fever.

While the timeline wasn’t specified, some days later, the parents took their daughter to the emergency room at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock.

“I just noticed one morning that she was saying she was getting very tired, and I was just noticing her breathing wasn’t normal,” the child’s mother told Polly Tommey of CHD.TV.

“We just decided we’d go to emergency and get it checked out,” the mother said during the video interview. “ It wasn’t anything bad, like, very bad, it was just something I was concerned about.”

While their daughter’s measles were disappearing, her fever kept “going higher and higher,” the father said during the interview.

When they arrived at the hospital, they were asked whether their daughter had the MMR vaccine, which she had not. Doctors soon informed them that their daughter had pneumonia in her left lung.

“Just a little bit,” the mother told CHD. “But they said if it would get worse they would probably drain the fluids and it would get better, but they never did, I don’t know why not; they didn’t tell us.”

She continued, “One nurse mentioned, she was talking about breathing treatments, that’s when they transferred her downstairs. And then I asked the nurse later if they were still going to do some breathing treatments, and she just said it wasn’t going to do very good … no explanation.”

The mother said her daughter didn’t want to talk because she was too tired and it was difficult for her to breathe. She was drinking, but sores in her mouth largely prevented her from eating.

The hospital medical staff put the young girl on a mechanical ventilator, and the parents were told they couldn’t spend the night in their daughter’s hospital room, so hospital staffers instead rented them a hotel room.

When they left their daughter, she was sedated and intubated, a medical procedure whereby a tube is inserted into the body to assist with breathing. “She was asleep the whole time, until she was gone,” the mother explained.

“What was the last thing she said to you?” the interviewer asked, causing the mother to sob.

“I just remember her, before they wanted to put her on the ventilator, that she was very thirsty, right, like she was very thirsty, her mouth was all sticky, and I wanted to give her water, but they didn’t let me,” said the mom.

The prognosis, they were told, was the same, that she’d be better in a couple of days, though that proved sadly, horribly inaccurate.

By this time, two grandparents, the dad’s mother and father, were also at the hospital, so it was decided they’d stay the night at the grandparents’ home with the other four children, planning to return to the hospital the next day. The child’s four siblings were not allowed to visit their sister.

The parents explained during the interview that the hospital called at 4:30 a.m. and the father answered the phone. “They said she was getting very bad. We had to go, we had to come really fast to the hospital,” he said.

When they were about 50 minutes away from the hospital, they received another phone call, this time asking the mother if they had permission to put the child on life support.

“Yes, whatever it takes to save her,” she responded.

When they arrived, they were told to wait, then a doctor informed them that their daughter was “was probably too sick to put her on life support, and her brain was probably passed away, anyways,” according to the mother.

She died soon thereafter.

The Beacon reached out to the hospital by email with the following questions:

“When can we expect a death certificate and the cause of death?”

“Also, why were breathing treatments denied?”

“Why were the four siblings not allowed to see their sister at the hospital?”

“Why were the parents told to leave their daughter's room and instead go to a hotel?”

“Why was life support denied?”

The Beacon will update this story should the hospital respond.

Two days after the passing of their sister, her four siblings also got the measles, and were treated by Edwards.

Edwards told the Beacon he treated the siblings, 7, 5, 3 and 2 years old, with Tylenol, vitamin A, cod liver oil and budesonide, typically used for asthma, COPD, hay fever and other conditions.

“Dr. Ben came helping us and he gave them treatments … they had a really good, quick recovery,” said the mom.

“We would absolutely not take the MMR. The measles wasn’t that bad. They got over it pretty quickly, and Dr. Edwards was there for us,” she said. “He was amazing,” the father added.

When the couple was asked what they’d say to parents who believe they must vaccinate their babies because the media is reporting their daughter died of measles, a German interpreter stepped in to further explain the question.

“They would still say, don’t do the shots. There’s doctors that can help with measles. They’re not as bad as they’re making it out to be,” the interpreter said, translating what the couple had told her in German.

.On Wednesday, Edwards told CHD.TV: “I know this is an inflammatory subject. It’s a tragic error. I do want to say, as I look through the medical records, there was some outstanding care given all along the way. And, as Dr. Kory pointed out, this was a big mistake, a tragic mistake and, I agree, a fatal mistake.”

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