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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 ten thousand readers across the globe. Some of the MPOST’s audience, 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.”
Dueck, who grew up “modern,” characterized the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) shot in his article as “safe and highly effective against infection and severe disease.” He enumerated measles-related statistics. “So we can see,” he concluded, “that people who have received a measles vaccination are better protected against this terrible and highly contagious disease.” In the same edition, he published a piece by Carlos Wiens, a doctor with a running column in the MPOST, the text radiating around two gigantic photos of a measles rash and sitting next to a recipe for Südwestlicher Salat (Southwestern Salad).
Mennonites fall across a wide spectrum of religious practice and insularity. For some, the MPOSTis one of the only pieces of printed information allowed inside the home, besides “the Bible, catechisms, or hymnals,” Laura Kalmar, the MCC Canada senior director of communications, told me. “A significant amount of women have said that this gives them access to literacy materials that maybe they wouldn’t have otherwise.” Coverage curls across vast tracts of land, and it can be only in the pages of the MPOST that some readers are able to speak with one another or learn about what is probably too often termed (by others) the “outside world.” For Dueck—who is fifty-one, only the paper’s fourth editor, and seen by many as a “celebrity” (readers “want to touch me,” he said)—covering the story of the outbreak required managing an extraordinarily delicate journalistic position. “I’m not going to judge on your behaviors,” he recalled thinking. He is vaccinated, he said, but “I’m not that person that will tell them you have to vaccinate or not.”
Dueck, the son of peanut farmers in Paraguay, was raised to be fluent in Low German—or Plautdietsch, the mostly oral mother tongue that his grandparents spoke, and that Karl Hildebrand, a Mennonite delegate to Paraguay, once called “a good fence or enclosure for us.” Dueck spent time living in Germany, writing a master’s thesis on the use of Low German in conservative Mennonite colonies in Paraguay. The MPOST is written in High German but frequently contains snippets of Low German, and it was started by the MCC both to link different parts of the Mennonite diaspora and to promote literacy in communities separated, in degrees, from the modern world. Before becoming editor, in 2023, Dueck was a long-haul truck driver, house framer, and, before that, school superintendent.
Partially because of its relationship to MCC, which was formed to offer relief to persecuted Mennonites in Ukraine in the 1920s, the MPOST has historically been trusted by those reluctant to step outside of the “fence.” Despite stereotypes, that fence is not a wall: it has idiosyncratic and sometimes generational holes. Younger people in “Old Colony” communities might have cellphones and use social media. As Jack Lesniewski, an MCC area director for Cuba, Mexico, and South America, told me, even insulated groups are “not immune to or isolated from broader global and regional trends.” They might make and sell apple juice or cheese. As such, they are influenced by things such as “climate change and the tariff policy in the US.” Mennonite colonies, he said, “are diverse, complicated communities.”
A significant part of Dueck’s job is travel, as he must connect with his readership, give talks, and collect stories. That frequently involves arriving by car to places built on the idea of intentional disconnection from contemporary technologies. This is not uncontroversial. In some insular communities, individuals have been excommunicated for driving. In one case, in Belize, a boy picking Dueck up from the airport did so in his excommunicated parents’ car. These communities might not “go with cars and motorcycles or tractors, even, on rubber tires,” Dueck said. “That’s just because if they would have tractors with rubber tires, they are more able to go more fast on normal streets, outside the colony, outside the community, and then they can’t keep their own traditional life.” In other words, for some conservative Mennonites, rubber tires might be seen as a threat.
On trips, Dueck nearly always stays in subscribers’ houses. In Belize, a family with young children gave him their single air-conditioned room, while they slept together on the kitchen floor. He is feted with large meals and celebrations; he gives speeches, including one in Mexico about cleaning up after oneself, after which Dueck saw a group of boys on a cart, picking up garbage from the road. “They heard him and completely responded with action,” Kalmar said. She described Dueck as having a “space” in his readers’ homes “that literally nobody else has, other than the pastor.”
Dueck had been due to visit Seminole as part of an MCC tour before news of the measles outbreak emerged by way of the MPOST’s Leserbriefe (letters to the editor) section: “Now it’s winter. It’s been quite cold,” Johann and Katharina Neustädter had written in early February. They described “nothing new” at work in the blacksmith shop, and only at the end mentioned, “Oh yes, there are a lot of sick people here. Many have fever, diarrhea, vomiting, or measles. Also headaches and colds. That’s not going well. That’s not good.” In mid-March, he took the trip.
Seminole, which sits within the Permian Basin, is rural, the town tied to the oil and gas industry. Dueck stayed, uncharacteristically, in a hotel, which was paid for by a local member of the Mennonite community. He visited a school and spoke with the principal. He stopped in, too, at a retirement home and a museum owned by a woman named Tina Siemens, who was helping to translate measles information into Low German and post it around town.
Upon his return, the MCC was approached by the Canadian government’s health department, and then asked Dueck what, given his position, might be done about the health crisis. “I just said, ‘Well, I have an idea,’” he remembered. “‘I will write an article about my visit in Seminole, and I could include, in a kind way, some guidelines.’”
He sensed that forcefully urging vaccination would backfire—and noted, in any case, that older people seemed to already be vaccinated, whereas younger people might not be. Older people tend to remember the work the MCC did in postwar Europe to “escape really challenging situations,” Lesniewski said. But in recent years, there have been “rumors of the Mennonite Post being sort of ‘mainstream media.’ Where that term came from is obviously not from, necessarily, the bishop of your Low German Mennonite church in Bolivia talking about the mainstream media, but messages that come from around and about.”
Reporting from sources outside the community linked vaccine resistance to Mennonite separatism. Certainly, that was part of the story. But it was important, Dueck thought, to remind people that measles was not “a disease that only Mennonites get.” To Lesniewski, forms of resistance to public health measures were complex, because of tradition and insularity as well as political polarization more broadly. After all, vaccine resistance had recently been growing in Gaines County, where Seminole sits: an NBC article found that “vaccine exemptions had more than doubled” there in the past decade. Researchers at Johns Hopkins, in a study this year, announced that measles vaccination rates have been falling nationally, with almost 80 percent of two thousand counties across thirty-three states reporting a decline. By the time Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited Seminole for the funeral of a second child’s measles death, on April 3, the virus had spread into New Mexico. It continued on to Kansas, Oklahoma, and beyond.
Siemens, it was eventually reported, while helping translate articles on vaccination and treatment into Low German, had also brought in a doctor, Ben Edwards, who treated patients while sick with measles himself, prescribing them vitamin A, cod liver oil, budesonide, and other supplements, but not the vaccine. (Neither Siemens nor Edwards responded to my requests for comment.)
Dueck focused on his article, which drew upon health guidance from the Canadian government. But there was also a homegrown story to tell. To Dueck, “love thy neighbor” provided reason enough to stop the spread. “I just figured, well, this is something that we as Christians have in our Scripture,” he said. In the MPOST, he wrote that “if someone has measles, they should under no circumstances leave the house and come into contact with other people.” “Just stay home, wait a couple of weeks, then you’re good to go,” he remembered wanting to advise people who were vaccine-resistant. But he also noted that “you can get a measles vaccination to protect yourself and your family. If you are vaccinated, you cannot get or spread the virus as easily.” And he wrote that “taking Vitamin A will not prevent measles.”
In response to his coverage, Dueck got an angry call from a reader who asked him if he knew the logo of the World Health Organization: something about a snake and the devil. “Yeah, just screaming at me,” Dueck remembered. Nearly all the rest of the feedback he received was positive, though. “Sometimes it’s hard to believe,” he said, of how someone might view life inside the more insular communities of his readers, a patchwork of complicated resistance to and engagement with cars, tires, vaccines. To an outsider, “it doesn’t make sense,” he told me. Still, “you don’t question the rules. You don’t question the tradition.” Lately, the letters from Seminole about measles have slowed. But nationally, cases have hit their highest number since 1992. Dueck doesn’t seem to be done with the story.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to clarify the size of the MPOST audience.
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