Forty states saw rises in parents citing religious or other personal concerns for not vaccinating their young children.
The number of kids whose caregivers are opting them out of routine childhood vaccines has reached an all-time high, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday, potentially leaving hundreds of thousands of children unprotected against preventable diseases like measles and whooping cough.
The report did not dive into the reasons for the increase, but experts said the findings clearly reflect Americans’ growing unease about medicine in general.
“There is a rising distrust in the health care system,” said Dr. Amna Husain, a pediatrician in private practice in North Carolina, as well as a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. Vaccine exemptions “have unfortunately trended upward with it.”
Nature is wrong.
A species CAN regress.
The idea that evolution is always progress is incorrect.
It’s more like a random walk where adaptable changes are more likely to continue and maladaptive changes are more likely to die out.
But we live in a society where we artificially keep maladaptive humans alive to reproduce, and even tend to have them reproduce at a higher rate than the members of society that are most adaptable.
In theory this could be an issue if we were going to depend on adaptive changes to human biological and environmental developments for continued success.
In reality, it’s not going to matter as within a generation we’re going to have effectively infinitely scalable AI which is more adaptable than the average human and will offset the growth in maladaptive humans relative to adaptable.
Which will still not matter, as within a century the various debts we as a species are taking on will likely have inescapable consequences that doom us all, at best our cultural legacy living on with the continuation of AI that is adaptable to the environmental hellscape we leave behind.
People misunderstanding evolution constantly always confused the shit out of me lmfao.
Of course species regress. It’s how extinctions happen lmfao. Also 95% of evolution is what women of the species think looks good enough to bang. Sometimes that means you mean drown when it rains lmfao. Looking at all of you snub nosed monkeys and traumatic enseminators.
They warned about these people back in the 1930s and we didn’t listen.
Religious exemptions need to be banned outright throughout the United States.
Actively withholding your child from receiving vaccines should be grounds for losing custody.
Sadly, I would guess that a challenge against religious exemption would be decided against on first amendment grounds by SCOTUS.
Which is madness. If we’re at the point where abortion can’t be found in the federal Constitution, then vaccine opt outs shouldn’t be derived from the first amendment.
You could have just said you don’t understand the first amendment. What exactly do you think the freedom of religion part is about?
The first amendment protects them here. However, it does not automatically grant them access to government services such as school and welfare. Our focus shouldn’t be so narrow that we forget to protect the people who children are incapable of being vaccinated. So denying these people access to school or government facilities is always an option we should look into.
The first amendment protects them here.
That depends on the court, and on how broadly the relevant rule is written. It’s a hell of a claim to say that my religion must exempt me from laws that apply to others, and that’s exactly the sort of claim being advanced when we say that our religion requires us to not do [things that our religion says nothing about].
A relevant precedent, in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, reached in 1905 regarding the constitutionality of compulsory vaccination law, held that individual liberty is not absolute and that the public interest can justify narrowly subjecting it to the authority of the state. (note that this ruling was narrowly about public health authority and its enforceability, and the stakes of the dispute were that if Jacobson didn’t want to be vaccinated, he would be made to pay a fine and nowhere was child custody ever questioned)
The Court held that “in every well ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand” and that “[r]eal liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own [liberty], whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.”
Personally I agree there shouldn’t be religious exemptions on vaccines, that the only cases that justify non-vaccinated kids attending schools would be medical justifications, not religious ones. Allowing non-medical people to carve unscientific loopholes in best public health praxis because they feel like Jesus or Cthulu (neither of whom said to not get vaccines) wouldn’t want that basically means, if you extend that reasoning to its logical end, that when I say I have a religion and I tell you it means that law cannot apply to me or else it violates 1A, that no law can be consistently made to apply to anyone. …and when it can’t be made to apply to everyone equally, expect it to be applied, forcefully, to people of the wrong faith, or of the wrong race, or of the wrong caste.
Vaccine exemptions should not exist at all unless a physician (MD or DO, not a naturopath or chiropractor) cites a reason why the vaccine should not be administered.
There are many unscrupulous MD/DOs that will happily compromise their morals for a quick buck. In my opinion they should lose their license, but it usually takes a while and they can do a lot of damage before then.
What are we to do when a parent brings in a paper covered with Bible verses?
The sad reality is you can get away with saying whatever stupid bullshit you want as long as you add “because God says so” at the end of the sentence. It’s the ultimate thought terminating cliche.
If someone commits a murder, “God told me to” is not a valid legal argument. They’ll still be prosecuted. This should be the same. People can practice their religion however they want until it starts causing suffering to others.
Another pandemic, let’s goooo!
