Source: Washington Post
by Megan McArdle
“Even ardent vaccine lovers like myself have uneasily accepted the right of religious communities to opt out of vaccination and other health care. There are limits to that right when the danger is grave — courts have held (correctly) that blood transfusions can be given to the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses over the objections of their parents. But when the risk of imminent harm is low, we defer to the community. The child’s death, while horrible, represents a very unusual occurrence: The last person to die from measles in America was an immunosuppressed woman who caught it in a hospital in 2015. Though this might not be a direct result of our current political wars, it has implications for that larger story.” (02/28/25)