- 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.
Parahprasing greatly here, but in her recent book, Naomi Klein pointed out that most Americans are pilled as fuck on neoliberalism, and because the pandemic is a naturally occurring and obvious contradiction to its fundamental tenets (individualism, meritocracy, competiton, etc.), the only way to square that circle was to go insane.
I find that framework very useful. These so called activists are pilled as hell on this fundamentally individualist concept of freedom that inundates us Americans from birth. It’s an almost entirely empty conception of freedom. Basically, we can say whatever we want while owning guns and generally being selfish. No one is entitled to be free of childhood disease though. That’s not freedom because it encroaches on others being selfish. If you genuinely believe in individual liberty above all, as Americans are taught from birth, then childhood vaccinations are wrong.
Unfortunately it’s a really fucking stupid way to run a society.
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-washinglobbying/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.That’s a sobering thought regarding the strict regulation of private transportation, and how much more access and discriminatory power it gives the police.
I generally agree with you except I’m on the other side. I would usually pick the freedom side of a freedom/safety trade-off, with “freedom” defined as freedom from having anyone else tell me what to do, not freedom from disease. I support the general principle that a person should not be compelled to undergo a medical procedure for the benefit of others.
With that said, mandatory vaccinations really are pushing the boundaries of my libertarianism. They’re good for the individual rather than a sacrifice simply for the sake of others, and having the large majority of people vaccinated has major advantages for everyone. I’d put them in the same category as fire departments (and I’m vaccinated myself) but because I get where the vaccine opponents are coming from, I agree with letting them opt out if they go through all the paperwork. That has most of the benefits of universally mandatory vaccination but without having to force anyone who really, really doesn’t want to for whatever reason.
(I suppose there’s a libertarian argument to be made in favor of personal liability for spreading disease. If you infect me with covid, I should be able to sue you for damages just as if you negligently caused me bodily harm via other means. Of course that’s entirely impractical.)
Get the fuck out of my society then
Your society?
Yes. Go start the removed antivax society.
I don’t need to - someone else already did and called it the USA.
Hahaha, so you’re saying you live in a removed antivax society?
I live in a society where antivax people have certain legal protections against medical compulsion regardless of whether you or I think that making use of those protections is “removed”, so I suppose you could say that.
Sounds removed fam, I’d rather live in a healthy society and not have to worry about fucking smallpox. Happy for you tho
The impracticality of holding somebody liable for things they put into the air that hurt you also sounds a lot like our big polluting corporations.
It’s funny how many conservative opinions require a leap to “this problem doesn’t exist anyway.”
If vaccinations only protected the person being vaccinated and didn’t protect anyone else, I’d say “let people decide whether or not to be vaccinated.”! It would still be the better idea to vaccinate, but I’d be fine (in that theoretical world) with them choosing not to vaccinate.
However, I also believe that your right to swing your fist ends at my face. People don’t have the right to do things that actively hurt others. Not getting vaccinated means that you can transmit highly infectious and deadly diseases. Deciding not to vaccinate could mean that a person is deciding that other people will die.
Apart from valid medical reasons (e.g. autoimmune disorders or allergic reactions to vaccine components), people shouldn’t be able to opt out. In a society, we often curb the individual liberties to protect people. I’m not free to decide to drive drunk and it’s not because I could hurt myself by doing so. If I drove drunk, I could hurt other people and so it’s illegal.
Civil suits could be the answer, except it’s nearly impossible to prove that Timmy got measles when he passed by Jane in aisle B31 of Target. The level of contact tracing that would be required to absolutely prove this would be orders of magnitude more invasive than vaccines.
We shouldn’t allow “personal freedom” to skip vaccinations with the trade-off being other people’s lives.
We do let people make decisions that put others at risk, if that risk is small enough. You use drunk driving as an example of something which is illegal because it can hurt other people, but driving at all can hurt other people. Someone who drives a lot every day is more likely to accidentally harm another person than someone who doesn’t drive. Despite this, driving is legal and simply choosing to drive (as opposed to breaking traffic laws or driving recklessly) doesn’t make the driver liable if he hurts someone.
Is being unvaccinated more like drunk driving or like driving at all, in terms of the risk to others? I haven’t done the math but I expect that it’s more like driving at all, and IMO it would have to be a lot more dangerous than ordinary driving in order to justify the inherently onerous requirement of undergoing a mandatory medical procedure.
Driving does require licensing, though. You need to register with the state to say that you can drive. This license can be revoked if you don’t drive safely. If you drive without a valid license, you can get in a lot of legal hot water.
Vaccination might be compared to driving without a license. Let’s say you let one person drive without a license because they promised to drive safely. They might be fine and not cause any accidents. This is analogous to a small number of anti-vaxxers not getting sick/spreading illness because they are still covered by herd immunity.
However, as more people are allowed to drive without a license, more accidents would happen. This would be especially true if we allowed people exceptions to things like speed limits and driving on the sidewalk because their “sincerely held religious beliefs” state that they are allowed to do this. At that point, we’d have a lot of accidents and a lot of people being hurt.
There are a lot of regulations around driving (licensing, road rules, yearly car inspections) that are onerous in an effort to keep driving as safe as possible. Getting rid of those regulations “for personal freedom” would cause many, many deaths. Allowing people to just refuse vaccinations for any reason would also cause many, many deaths.