Yes, this is when the families we know from the local Waldorf school community finally went and got their kids vaxed. We are in the bay area.
As an aside, the ~45 states that allow religious or philosophical objections to school vaccinations are much, much worse for public health than Florida not requiring quarantine.
It was actually striking to me how MANY families that were SO anti-vax just went ahead and got the vax after the law changed here. It became less convenient to opt out, and they stopped opting out and really I didn’t hear much about it any more from those families. It was a real eye opener to me about how impactful those laws are.
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Williamsburg is the home of the largest group of Satmar Hassidic Jews in NYC. They try to live their lives as if they were in late 19th century eastern Europe.
It was about 26 years ago when Andrew Wakefield published a paper (since retracted) suggesting a connection between vaccination and autism.
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The Satmar vaccine refusal was not religion based. In fact, it is in direct contradiction to jewish law to refuse healthcare. It was word of mouth fad contagion, like in Marin. It is not modernity per se that Hasidim reject, but more anything that threatens their extremely conservative religious lifestyle.
Before CA changed its law to eliminate religious and philosophical objections, the State Leg reached out to dozens of organized religions, and not one said that their religions beliefs opposed vaccines.
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Yes I know. That’s why I said some areas have religious reasons for being pockets of unvaccinated people. Just because they want to live as if it were 1890 doesn’t mean measles will respect their beliefs or keep it confined to that neighborhood.
My cousin was a female doctor in eastern PA, Amish and Mennonite country. She had a lot of patients who weren’t vaccinated, and usually only saw her to deliver a baby.
Thank you for the clarification. When my daughter was in middle school, I drove through their neighborhood many times each week. Glad to learn more.
The one thing about the Amish is that they pretty much live in a closed community, with little or no contact with outsiders—that would offer some degree of protection.
OHOH, the Hasidic Jews of NYC do live amongst themselves, but interact in the business world, many of them in the diamond trade. That would offer some exposure from non-members of the sect.
And the Hasidim go to stores, ride public transportation, go to clinics and hospitals, almost just like real humans! (Sarcasm)
They are people, just as we are, and although their religious observances separate them somewhat from society, they are most definitely out in the world.
Some of the Amish interact with the public in their stores, at medical appointments, in the government, etc., going back and forth between their farms and the towns. Measles can easily pass between those who do and those who don’t stay on the farms, and those leaving the farms can bring their germs with them. As I said some came to my cousin’s medical practice in a town and the kids would play across the street at the playground with town kids. Hopefully, all the town kids had MMRs. In the areas where there are large Amish communities (PA, Ohio, IN) you often see Amish in the cities, using trains and buses.
This thread was a criticism of the Florida surgeon general for not ordering quarantine. None of these other communities are ordered to isolate even when there is an outbreak. NY ordered people to get vaccinated, but IMO the horse had left the barn.
https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/about/press/pr2019/measles-cases-rise.page
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Yes, New York provides religious exemptions from vaccinations. (so how strong is the “order”?)
It is extremely rare to be granted a religious exemption.
Measles death reported in Ontario. Ontario's first measles death in decades offers grim reminder that unvaccinated kids are at risk | CBC News
But we avoided the tremendous wave of measles that I had been expecting that we would have, after the Florida clusters and no mandated quarantine for the unvaccinated exposed kids from that school.
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