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.

  • Ooops
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    1 year ago

    I think it’s much more than that.

    For example people also pretend the mode of transportation requiring licensing, regular checkups, a rigorous following of additional rules and the requirement to constantly display your identification is somehow the epitome of personal freedom.

    So I’m pretty sure it’s not just “going insane” as the reality contradicts their believe. There is also a fuck-ton of brain-washing lobbying/advertising involved to influence people to move into certain directions. The move to resist vaccination simply isn’t natural in the US (it certainly wasn’t in the past), unless for a very small group of people. Then is was coopted and inflated as just another front of a cultural war to divide and polarize people.

    • @[email protected]
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      51 year ago

      That’s a sobering thought regarding the strict regulation of private transportation, and how much more access and discriminatory power it gives the police.