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.
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.