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posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 08 2019, @04:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the greater-good dept.

foxnews.com/us/states-seek-to-cut-off-religious-exemptions-for-vaccination

Connecticut's Attorney General gave state lawmakers the legal go-ahead Monday to pursue legislation that would prevent parents from exempting their children from vaccinations for religious reasons, a move that several states are considering amid a significant measles outbreak.

The non-binding ruling from William Tong, a Democrat, was released the same day public health officials in neighboring New York called on state legislators there to pass similar legislation . Most of the cases in the current outbreak have been in New York state.

[...] Connecticut is just one of several states considering whether to end longstanding laws that allow people to opt out of vaccinations for religious purposes. In the face of outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, some have alleged religious exemptions have been abused by "anti-vaxxers" who believe vaccines are harmful despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

But the proposals to eliminate the opt-outs have also sparked emotional debates about religious freedom and the rights of parents.

Most religions have no prohibitions against vaccinations, according to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee. Yet the number of people seeking the religious exemption in Connecticut has been consistently climbing. There were 316 issued during the 2003-04 school year, compared to 1,255 in the 2017-18 school year.

[...] All 50 states have laws requiring students to have certain vaccinations. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, all but Mississippi, West Virginia and California grant religious exemptions. As of Jan. 30, the conference said 17 states allowed people to exempt their children for personal, moral or other philosophical beliefs.


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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday May 09 2019, @04:25AM (2 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 09 2019, @04:25AM (#841198) Journal

    The problem is those antibody assays aren't that accurate in predicting immunity to future infections. I went in to get a second vaccination, and they told me not only that they didn't think I needed one, having had measles already, but that the test for immunity level was not that reliable. They'd do it if I requested, but they didn't think it was that useful.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @04:52AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @04:52AM (#841205)

    Those same tests are used to "confirm" cases of measles. There are tens of thousands of suspected cases every year, and the vast majority are being called "measles like illness due to unknown virus" instead of measles based on those tests.

    I could also believe that those cases are all measles (which they are according to the pre-vaccine definition of measles based solely on clinical symptoms). The continued clockwork seasonally of measles in the US suggests it is still circulating same as ever. In a couple weeks measles will drop from the news and we won't hear about it again until the winter.

    https://image.ibb.co/iM5f4S/Measles_Cases_By_Week.png [image.ibb.co]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @05:00AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @05:00AM (#841207)

    And look at this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22966129 [nih.gov]

    People who had measles 10-15 years before the others got mmr (Group 4) still have antibody levels 4x higher. No one who got measles ~1970 had a problem with waning antibodies, but 15% of people who got mmr in 1982 had undetectable levels 20 years later.

    So if you had measles, you are probably fine.