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.

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.

  • QuentinCallaghanEnglish
    40•7 months ago

    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.

    • jayrhacker
      10•7 months ago

      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.

    • @Zink@programming.dev
      6•7 months ago

      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.