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.
I’ll probably get downvoted for saying this, but nobody should be forced to undergo a medical procedure against their will, no matter how stupid refusal is.
Either we believe in bodily autonomy or we don’t.
I believe that your bodily autonomy ends at your ability to infect my body with your germs. Stop trying to commandeer the rhetoric of abortion rights and pretending the two situations are analogous because they are not.
Vaccination is more like requiring people to carry car insurance. Because what you do is going to affect me.
I’ve seen the effects of forced neuroleptic injections on a friend before, that’s why I feel so strongly about this, I’m not commandeering anything.
Forced antipsychotics given via injection is a fine argument to have. Bad side effects from giving them and other bad effects from not. The patient, and only the patient, suffers directly either way.
But that conversation has NOTHING to do with vaccines, which helps protect both the patient and anyone the patient comes in contact with. That’s like saying you have the bodily autonomy to wander naked through the grocery store and pee wherever you’d like. Your choice is affecting others, so it’s not acceptable.
Neuroleptics are for psychiatric conditions and have serious side effects that are not uncommon.
Vaccines are for infectious diseases, side effects are mild with serious ones being very rare, and widespread use is very important on a population level.
Your take is incredibly misdirected. This isn’t remotely the same kind of freedom being impeded.
I can’t believe I have to say this but, neuroleptic injections ≠ vaccines.
I think the problem here is that they are refusing, and they’re complaining that schools are requiring it.
Like they’re fucking around, and trying to avoid finding out.
If all state schools require it, then it’s only freedom for those wealthy enough to send their kids to private school.
The poor deserve bodily autonomy too.
Finding out stage.