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.

  • Dizzy Devil DuckyEnglish
    28•1 year ago

    I don’t recall any of the major accepted religions saying that anything like a vaccine is bad. But these are the types of people who will probably use religion as a way to get out of anything they don’t like or they think it challenges “God’s plan”, even if it lets them live longer.

    • TWeaKEnglish
      17•1 year ago

      Yeah but this is exactly the kind of thing that should be rejected as it is not “a sincerely held religious belief”. You can’t claim it’s a religious belief when your religion does not hold that belief, only you do.

      • bluGill
        11•1 year ago

        The US has religious freedom in the extreme. Anything you make up to worship religiously is considered a religion by default. It takes very strong evidence to prove otherwise.

        There are pros and cons to that, this is one of the cons.