A West Texas Children’s Clinic Where Vaccine Suspicion Is Encouraged

On a warm October day, Victoria Rodriguez tried to soothe her restless daughter as the girl fidgeted on an examining table of a West Texas children’s clinic. Pia Habersang, the nurse practitioner who runs the clinic, leaned closer. “How is her speech?” she asked.

“She doesn’t talk,” Ms. Rodriguez said, paused and then added, “She is kind of saying ‘no’ more.”

Ms. Rodriguez was insistent that her daughter, diagnosed with autism, needed care from the Pediatric Wellness Center of Amarillo, where parents are greeted with messages professing the side effects of vaccinations and possible connections to autism — connections that medical experts say have been debunked in several medical studies.

Dr. Habersang is a nurse practitioner with a doctorate in child and youth studies from Nova Southeastern University, but is not herself a medical doctor; she runs the center with her husband, who is a physician. She begins her initial medical sessions with new patients’ parents by discussing her concerns about vaccines, the addition of aluminum salts to shots and the rise in autism diagnoses that she insists is connected to vaccination rates.

If a child has a genetic predisposition to autism, she tells parents, early exposure to a vaccine that contains small amounts of aluminum salts, as well as factors like a diet high in saturated fats and sugar, can accelerate toxicity in the body and worsen the condition.

“If you look at lists like that, the autism increase, there has to be a reason,” Dr. Habersang said.

Virtually all immunologists, pediatricians, virologists, microbiologists and other medical experts have rejected her ideas and have hailed vaccines as lifesavers, extending life expectancy, improving childhood health immeasurably and saving millions of people from life-threatening or debilitating diseases like measles, polio and cervical cancer.

“It is totally understandable that parents are looking for a reason for why this happens, because it can be so heartbreaking,” Catherine Lord, a psychology professor and autism expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, said about autism diagnoses. “But vaccines aren’t the reason.”

That has created an opening for professionals like Dr. Habersang. Parents at her center in Amarillo said they agreed to share their stories in large part because they felt validated by the Trump administration’s stance.

They said their vaccine skepticism was not shaken at all by the measles outbreak in West Texas this year, the largest in the United States since 2000. Hundreds were infected. Two young girls died.

Instead, parents spoke of their belief that a financial motivation must be behind the number of required vaccines, echoing Mr. Kennedy.

“You used to trust the government’s science — in my opinion, it’s all money driven now,” said Gianni Amato, who is married to a nurse and wonders if his son became autistic as a result of being vaccinated.

Ms. Rodriguez, 45, a hairdresser, said she knew where the larger medical community stands. She simply does not believe the scientific consensus. She told Dr. Habersang how her daughter, now 11, changed from an observant and vocal baby to one who was more withdrawn and nonverbal, symptoms she later associated with autism.

Maybe the vaccines weren’t the only culprit, she said, but she was convinced that they were somehow part of the problem.

“I would not go to another doctor,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “All they want to do is push the vaccines on you.”

In Texas, the percentage of kindergartners without all their recommended immunizations has nearly doubled over the past five school years. About 25,000 kindergartners, more than in any other state, were lacking at least one of their measles shots in early 2025, even after the virus began to spread.

She opened her own pediatric practice in 2013, giving her the freedom to take a closer look at vaccines for children, she said in an interview in her office in Amarillo. A chart in her examination room said that children in 1962 were given three vaccines in a total of five doses; in 1983, the standard was four vaccines in 24 doses; and now it is 16 vaccines in 88 doses.

Medical experts say the total exposure to antigens that children receive through vaccination today is actually lower than it was in the 1990s. Children get far more exposure to antigens — by orders of magnitude — through ordinary encounters in the course of a normal day than they do through vaccines. Children do receive more types of vaccines than before, but that is because new ones have been developed to protect against new pathogens, like the coronavirus, medical experts say.

Dozens of studies, nationally and internationally, have found no correlation between autism rates and vaccines. Aluminum salts in tiny amounts — often measured in the one-millionth of a gram — have been added to vaccines since the 1920s to enhance their immune-stimulating effect against the virus or bacteria covered by the inoculation. Vaccine experts say the aluminum salts are essential to generating lasting immunity, and permit vaccines to be effective in smaller doses.

But this expertise is falling on many skeptical ears. About 80 percent of Dr. Habersang’s patients choose not to vaccinate their children, or stop vaccinating them before completing all the recommended immunizations, she said.

“The medical community hates me,” she added, “and you know? I don’t care.”

Many of the parents at the clinic had the same views about vaccines.

Kellen Cunyus, now 7, received the required vaccines until he was 15 months old. That is when his parents noticed a change in him. The boy’s mother, Jansyn Cunyus, said her son began developing symptoms associated with autism, including stimming and repetitive behavior. He became nonverbal, stopped making eye contact, had a difficult time sleeping and was covered in rashes, Mrs. Cunyus said.

Similar stories of symptoms that develop after vaccines are administered surface often at the clinic. Ms. Rodriguez said she took her daughter Jazlynn to get the recommended vaccines until she was about a year old. After Jazlynn was given the M.M.R. — measles, mumps and rubella — and hepatitis B vaccines, she developed a fever, which doctors say is a normal reaction to any shot and an indication that the immune system had been activated by the vaccine, as intended.

But her mother said the child’s behavior also started changing.

“She was a happy baby, making eye contact and clapping her hands,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “After the vaccine, she stopped talking and making eye contact.”

Correlation is not causation. Dr. Lord, the expert on autism, said parents often miss symptoms related to autism that develop before their children are a year old. And most children who are autistic begin showing signs of the condition between the ages of 12 and 15 months, regardless of their vaccination status, Dr. Lord said.

The Cunyuses don’t blame vaccines completely. Kellen received antibiotics as an infant as well. Genetics may also have played a role, they theorized, as well as environmental factors. Still, they were convinced that the minerals contained in the shots were poisoning Kellen’s body.

They said they tried everything “under the sun” to help him, including occupational therapy, speech therapy, sensory integration therapy, and equine therapy. They hoped a healthy diet would rid him of what they saw as toxins.

“Gluten free, dairy free, dye free,” Mrs. Cunyus said. “I make everything from scratch.”

“He is very observant and very blunt,” Mrs. Cunyus told Dr. Pia. “That was not possible a few years ago.”

The Cunyuses know that their opinions about vaccines are not shared by most of the medical community, or by many people they know. But they believe that a growing number of people are coming around to their views.

“I wouldn’t call us, like, these crazy anti-vaxxers, by any means,” Mrs. Cunyus said. “We just are pro-information.”

Christine Fly, 26, said that while she was pregnant, she was influenced by books that recommend a slower vaccine schedule or no vaccines at all. Her midwife told her about Dr. Habersang.

Ms. Fly’s nine-month-old baby, Jessie, was not vaccinated at birth, and Ms. Fly said she did not plan to have her vaccinated in the future. She thinks that diseases like polio are overblown, though before the polio vaccine, the virus paralyzed and killed thousands each year. In 1952 alone, around 58,000 Americans contracted polio; 3,000 of them would die.