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The rise of religious exemptions from vaccines
In January, a measles outbreak at Disneyland caught the media’s attention. Over 114 cases appeared not only in California, but in six other U.S. states and parts of Mexico. Even though measles was officially eliminated from the United States in 2000, there have been more and more cases of the disease in the last seven years, with over 600 in 2014 alone. That year, one outbreak in an Amish community in Ohio included 383 diagnoses of measles. This particular religious community reconsidered its previous relaxed stance on vaccines. The Amish weren’t opposed to vaccination, but rather didn’t realize that measles was still such a threat to public health.
Why do so many people think vaccines should be voluntary?
Our normally fractious media and political world has reached an item of consensus: vaccines against deadly diseases are good, and kids should get them. As the Disneyland measles outbreak has brought new attention to the issue of vaccine refusal, prominent politicians have been asked to state their views for the record. Most have obliged with unambiguous statements that vaccines—including the MMR shot, which was linked by a totally discredited study to the incidence of autism—are safe and should be universal.
One outlier was Rand Paul, the libertarian senator from Kentucky, who has a tendency to shoot from the hip in just such situations.