A six-year old girl in Texas is dead. Not because of some rare, incurable disease. Not because doctors couldn’t save her. She died because her parents—guided by outdated, arrogant beliefs dressed up as faith—refused to protect her from a disease we’ve had a vaccine for since the 1970s.
She caught measles. They gave her castor oil and inhaled steroids, as if this was some Biblical-era affliction to be treated with snake oil and hope. When she got worse, they finally took her to the hospital, where she was intubated and died on February 26, 2025. And now, in the most chilling detail of all, her parents say it was “just her time” and that she’s “in a better place.”
No. Don’t you dare say it was her time. It was preventable. It was a failure of basic decency. A child died because her parents chose fantasy over medicine. It was a goddamn preventable, pointless death served up on an altar of arrogance, ignorance, and delusion.
She died because her parents chose superstition over science. She died because somewhere along the line, someone convinced them that vaccines were evil, and God prefers helplessness to action. She died because they believed that standing by in blind faith is more righteous than stepping up and doing the basic, decent thing to keep a child alive.
And what did they do after she died? They doubled down. Their other children—four of them—caught measles following their sister’s death. And instead of taking that death as the clearest, most horrifying warning imaginable, they once again turned to castor oil and steroids. Those other four children recovered, though who knows what side effects they will have from this throughout their lives. But let’s not mistake luck for wisdom. They survived in spite of their parents’ actions, not because of them.
This Is Not Faith. It’s Negligence
Picture this: My small child is walking into traffic on a busy highway. I see the cars coming. I see the danger. Someone in a house nearby screams, “Grab her! Pull her back!” But I hold up my hand and say, “Nah, if she’s meant to be spared, God will do it.” And so I let her keep walking. She’s hit by a car doing 45mph. She dies on impact. And then I turn to the crowd and say, “It was just her time.”
What would happen to me? I’d be called a monster. I’d be charged with negligence. No one would care about my beliefs or my intentions. No one would say, “Well, that’s just his personal choice.” Because the truth is plain: I had the power to stop it and I didn’t. I let her die in the name of faith—and that’s not spirituality, that’s manslaughter with extra steps.
And if, after that, I lined up my other children on the same road and said, “Let’s see if the rest survive,” I wouldn’t be seen as pious—I’d be arrested. Thrown in prison. Denounced by everyone with a shred of decency. But somehow, when this same reckless indifference is wrapped in religious tradition and medical ignorance, we’re expected to nod solemnly and whisper, “What a tragedy,” instead of shouting what this really is: a failure, a horror, and a death that never had to happen.
There is nothing holy about letting your child die when a simple vaccine could have saved her. There is no virtue in standing idle while disease spreads through your family because you’ve convinced yourself that medical science is somehow an affront to God.
Faith without responsibility is just cowardice wrapped in dogma. And let’s be clear—this isn’t persecution of religion. It’s a demand for accountability. You don’t get to opt out of reality and then act surprised when it crushes you.
Belief Is Not an Excuse for Death
We’ve let this twisted version of “faith” go unchecked for too long. We’ve allowed conspiracy to hide behind religious liberty. And while grown adults can choose delusion if they want, children cannot. Children rely on us to protect them. To make decisions based on truth, not magical thinking.
No benevolent God willed this. It was failure, plain and brutal—failure of reason, of responsibility, and of love, sacrificed on the altar of delusion dressed up as faith
This little girl never got the chance to grow up and make her own decisions. Her parents made them for her.
And now she’s dead.