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.
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 were 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 worried 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.