- cross-posted to:
- health@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- health@lemmy.world
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.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make, but mine is that actively choosing not to vaccinate a child against a common and deadly virus when you are able is actively endangering them (and of course others) for no good reason.
Presumably your child with a non-existent immune system is highly vulnerable to pretty much everything, so you are taking extra steps to protect them, like a responsible, loving, non-psychotic parent.
To be clear: I absolutely disagree with these assholes and their reckless endangerment of children, their own and others. I think if they get their way, we should still enforce required schooling but at a (festering) private school at their own expense.
Didn’t mean it to come across as you being a dick—more of me commenting on my frustrations with morons.
I’m relieved. I guess in a nutshell, I was (darkly) musing that if they get their way (and damn the consequences), one of the consequences will be that the stupidity will be strongly self-limiting within a generation.
I’d rather these fuckwits got a clue, but they’ll threaten to shoot you for trying to teach them something, so …?