Mississippi has long had high childhood immunization rates, but a federal judge has ordered the state to allow parents to opt out on religious grounds.
For more than 40 years, Mississippi had one of the strictest school vaccination requirements in the nation, and its high childhood immunization rates have been a source of pride. But in July, the state began excusing children from vaccination if their parents cited religious objections, after a federal judge sided with a “medical freedom” group.
Today, 2,100 Mississippi schoolchildren are officially exempt from vaccination on religious grounds. Five hundred more are exempt because their health precludes vaccination. Dr. Daniel P. Edney, the state health officer, warns that if the total number of exemptions climbs above 3,000, Mississippi will once again face the risk of deadly diseases that are now just a memory.
“For the last 40 years, our main goal has been to protect those children at highest risk of measles, mumps, rubella, polio,” Dr. Edney said in an interview, “and that’s those children that have chronic illnesses that make them more vulnerable.” He called the ruling “a very bitter pill for me to swallow.”
Mississippi is not an isolated case. Buoyed by their success at overturning coronavirus mandates, medical and religious freedom groups are taking aim at a new target: childhood school vaccine mandates, long considered the foundation of the nation’s defense against infectious disease.
Ah yes, that most cherished of freedoms, the freedom to let children die of easily preventable diseases
Up until now we’ve mostly seen diseases like measles and chicken pox but I’m expecting polio to show up soon … then the shit will hit the fan.
sigh
It’s a shame it’s the children of the ones who fuck around who get to find out
Even more of a shame that other people’s children are collateral damage
I guess every thread has to be about Palestine?
Other people’s children, as in those that want to be vaxed but can’t.
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Who said anything about palestine? I think you replied to the wrong comment.
Yeah.
My grandma was a nurse in the polio ward back in the day, and I had a friend (many many moons ago) who’d had polio.
Whooping cough is back. Yay.
‘Murica!
Can we just call these people pro-pestilence instead of dignifying them with names like ‘medical freedom activist’?
I swear this sort of euphemism has become the obvious tell that they’re up to no good and still demand respect for it
Up there with “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” as far as names that usually mean the opposite of what they’re claiming, huh?
‘Medical Freedom’ Activists
Plague rats. They’re plague rats.
Can we just jail or shoot them or something?
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Leper colony on an isolated island.
A rat king is quite analogous to the GOP
How many children are going to die because of these very likely ‘pro-life’ activists?
Yeah but how many will it save from vaccine death or, worse, autism? I mean surely the vast number of deaths related to childhood vaccinations in the past four decades will uphold their argument.
Edit: /s
my dude desperately needs that /s
Yeah that’s on me. Oh well.
We dont live in a world where sarcasm is obvious anymore, man.
You can say the most made up ridiculous shit, and its still not as bad as somethign that has literally come out of someones mouth, probably infront of a crowd.
which is why i /s anytime, anymore, no matter how obvious it was.
and yours was pretty damn obvious, and still got a lot of people thinking thats real.
Thats not a reflection of you, so much as its a reflection of what has become of society.
Which vast number?
I read it as pretty heavy sarcasm, but there are people that dumb, so I may be wrong.
I believe this is sarcasm, but it is hard to tell…
how many will it save from vaccine death or, worse, autism?
The number of people that are missing the obvious satire here is making me sad.
When someone says “I’m not against all vaccines, just the ones for COVID”, he is usually lying. In time this “skepticism” will slide into being against even the common vaccines and it can be seen now. My favorite blog Respectful Insolence had a good post about the so-called “medical freedom”:
"Health freedom” and “medical freedom” have become a rallying cry for libertarians, far right wingers, and even outright fascists. Indeed, the Republican Party has become a bastion of antivaccine and anti-public health hostility, a process that actually predates the pandemic by at least several years. “Health freedom” and “medical freedom” have always been code words for dismantling public health infrastructure, anything resembling a vaccine mandate (even in schools), and dismantling the FDA.
Same strategy as “School Choice” or “Parent’s Rights”, the first was created to suck money out of the public school infrastructure and put an end to quality free public schooling, the second to basically make children property again.
Yeah, many are against only COVID because it’s gotten all the attention. But whatever leaps in logic, conspiracy theories, and blog-eurekas have them being against the COVID vaccine will apply to all the others as well. There are people in my family who don’t get their flu shot for the same reasons as the COVID one.
What religions are against vaccines??
I don’t recall any of the major accepted religions saying that anything like a vaccine is bad. But these are the types of people who will probably use religion as a way to get out of anything they don’t like or they think it challenges “God’s plan”, even if it lets them live longer.
Yeah but this is exactly the kind of thing that should be rejected as it is not “a sincerely held religious belief”. You can’t claim it’s a religious belief when your religion does not hold that belief, only you do.
The US has religious freedom in the extreme. Anything you make up to worship religiously is considered a religion by default. It takes very strong evidence to prove otherwise.
There are pros and cons to that, this is one of the cons.
What are the pros?
You are not forced to worship and otherwise support some ‘god’ that you don’t believe in.
There are plenty of countries that don’t force worship etc without any sort of over the top “religious freedom”.
None.
Its cherry picking what suits their argument in the moment.
Same reason they’d get offended and file criminal complaints if you throw stones at them for wearing mixed fiber clothing.
Republicanism
Get me out of this godforsaken shithole country.
Why are our least educated people trying to act like they know things about stuff? Who empowered these ass clowns?
I say fight to make it a better place.
But if you really want to leave, it’s honestly not that hard. Start a go fund me page, it might not get you everything you need, but put that money away and then do another one. Crowd source your exit plan. Keep doing it until you have the needed money. Might it take a few years? Yes.
It is the well educated.doing this. The religious fundamentalists in Mississippi never went on the antIvax train as they know their scriptures well enough to know it isn’t there. However a few well.educated who don’t know their scriptures there are enough to being this to court againt the majority.
It couldn’t be the well-educated doing this. Because then they wouldn’t be well educated. It could be the well to do sadistic and manipulative people. Who get their kicks out of manipulating and riiling up ignorant people to vote against their own interests. But in a Venn diagram they would have little to no overlap with highly educated people in general.
Stop you bias and look. Anti vax comes from well educated middle class people. Few are educated in anything medical ,but they mostly are well educated .
Stop your bias and look. It’s not coming from them exclusively in any way shape or form. No one actually educated in the subject is pushing this bullshit. It’s all people with little to no knowledge generally of the subject they’re pushing. Yes there are few isolated nurses here and there. Who again are not trained in that sort of thing. Believing the lies of charlatans and spreading them. They are not what I would consider well educated in the subject. Just because you had an education in, something does not make you well educated in something else.
You two are argueing the semantics of ‘well-educated’, the one version meaning to have any higher education, the other to also have a well rounded, universal education. Both are valid definitions.
Nobody has a fully well rounded education. You can’t live that long. We all have gaps.
Otherwise you are correct , different semantics.
You are out of date. This hasn’t been the case for years now. It used to be vaccine refusal was common among the wealthy whites but it moved towards the bottom of economic groups.
Mississippi had the lowest rate of covid vaccination in the country, the hell are you talking about.
We want the freedom to have our own day in medical practice performed on our bodies!
But also ban all abortion care and all HRT and send people to prison for disagreeing!
We were real close to eradicating the measles virus worldwide. Then this stuff happened.
We almost got polio now, though, so some progress:
Parents with autoimmune children will teach their children to take more precautions in life but with a stronger sense of love. Republican Parents will kill their children and their bloodline.
If Republicans are so hellbent on Killing Children let’s at least look at the bright side and note it’ll only last a generation or two.
Bullshit, and this is the same fucked up defeatist logic people used to avoid a covid vaccine mandate.
Anti-vaxxers are not just hurting themselves, and they are not hurting themselves more than the rest of us, and they are not hurting themselves anywhere close to fast enough to kill themselves off. If you were right, this wouldn’t be a problem at all. Anti-vaxxers don’t die at a high enough rate to counter the spread of their stupidity. Covid, Pertussis, Measles, Mumps, Rubella, these diseases kill the sick, the elderly, the young, and the immunocompromised. The people who suffer most are the ones who would get vaccines if they could. It’s dangerous to act like they are hurting themselves.
This should be the top comment
God, I hate these cretins.
I’m just tired of my life being affected by fictional belief systems
I was on one of the vaccine trials. Had a cab driver on the way back from one of my checkups go on a COVID rant. It was awkward after I told him why I was there. Lmao. I’d do it again, felt great being protected asap, plus money.
Hey, fundamentalist smoothbrains, since “thinking” isn’t something you all like to do all that often, let me translate your pseudo biblical gibberish into plain English:
“I’d rather have some young person who had to fight for their life already loose that fight than allow my healthy child to get a little pinch and feel kind of down for three days”
“I’d rather have another parent stand at the grave of their little joy than allow my child to have a little ouchie on an arm”
“I’d rather cite Christianity as the reason why I act in a way Jesus would have turned away in disgust from than be a Christian and care for the most defenseless, helpless in our society this one little bit”
I really hope that the widespread cold disregard for other humans is something academics study in disbelief in the future, and not our downfall.
The first concept of vaccination was invented in 1796. It was an unknown idea before this. Which religion has an opinion on this and how exactly does that work when there was no concept of the thing in question when any of these religions was formed? It’s such utter bullshit on its face. There’s no grounds for this. It’s made up crap on top of made up crap, as a grounds to shirk a simple procedure that saves lives.
But, also, this headline is dumb. Religious medical freedom advocates have been about this for ages. The only thing new is they got one dumb judge to make a bad ruling.
I don’t have any evidence for this but it seems like the vaccine pushback is at least partially a desire to avoid responsibility. If they choose to vaccinate and their kid is in the 0.000001% who experience adverse effects then it would be their fault the kid was hurt but if they don’t vaccinate and their kid just happens to die of measles or whatever then it was all part of god’s plan and they didn’t do anything wrong.
That’s like being worries about food poisoning, so not feeding their kid. The parents didn’t do anything to make the kid malnourished, but if they fed the kid something that made them sick, they would be at fault.
But that’s not true. If their kid dies of malnourishment, it would still be the parents’ fault, because the parents are responsible for the kid’s health and safety.
What backward thinking. This isn’t the trolley problem.
The headline is agit-prop, letting an extremist group label themselves with some misleading name like “Medical Freedom” is as bad ad repeating the “Death Tax” or “School Freedom” talking points, which is how we lost the estate tax and quality free public schools.
Religion says not to alter or mutilate your body. That’s why very religious people might skip getting earrings or tattoos too.
Edit: A vaccine is, by definition, artificially altering your immune system response.
A vaccine isn’t going to alter your immune system response anymore than digging in the garden might. Honestly, digging in the garden or eating some fresh fruit/vegetables/cheese will probably expose you to more foreign genetic material, virii and microbes than a vaccine ever would, thereby altering your immune response to a much greater degree. It’s ignorant made up reasoning loosely based on ignorant made up useless meandering out dated philosophies.
The immune system is a learned response system. It’s trained by exposure. That’s the way it works. The specific way it is introduced to foreign material doesn’t matter, except that certain ways are more likely to allow an infection to take hold.
You know what can really alter and possibly mutilate a body? A serious infection.
Edit to add:
Going to the gym or just exercising alters the body by making it stronger, adding muscle, but have never heard a religious person say that is taboo because that would be ridiculous. Vaccines make your immune system stronger in much the same fashion, through use and training. There’s absolutely no good argument against them.
We may not see many repercussions from this now, but when the unvaccinated grow up and the viruses have had a generation’s worth of time to spread - just wait till a pregnant woman gets mumps and has a profoundly deaf baby. Or their toddler gets polio and ends up spending potentially years in a hospital, only to be released with lifetime disabilities. I know 2 people with polio, and one who is deaf due their mother having mumps (pre-vaccine days). Their lives, and the lives of their families, was/is hard. I wonder what grandma and grampa, safely vaccinated, will say when their grandkids start falling ill.
