...in the same county that had America's largest recent Measles outbreak in 30 years. Rockland county.
My good friend is a pediatrician in the area and frequently gets calls from mom's who ask if he does "evaluations for potential vaccine injury" - which is code for "I need a note from a doctor to have my child exempt from vaccination".
Unfortunately, their poor vaccination culture caused Measles to spread to neighboring New York City, and then across the country.
Its worth noting that on both the Rockland County and NYC sides, these outbreaks are largely contained to ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities that operate sort of adjacent to secular society.
Not that this excuses anything; much has been written about the challenges within and around these communities and the lives of people within them. But the issue is less that the modern public health apparatus has collapsed and more that there are large groups of people in these areas who have extreme religious views and generally seek isolation from the secular world - an isolation that extends up to and includes public education and public health.
The ultra-Orthodox Jews in Rockland are wrong. They just are. I'm Jewish. Judaism places the value of life above all else (Pikuach Nefesh). There's 613 commandments that guide an Orthodox Jew's life and you are commanded to break virtually all of them to preserve life. Vaccines are life preserving. By what interpretation of Judaism they can refuse vaccination, I cannot imagine.
At least that's my understanding of Judaism and how it was taught to me.
For people unfamiliar with the different Jewish movements: Rockland county is overwhelmingly Orthodox, specifically Hasidic. The Hasidim are a modern conservative interpretation of Judaism: it didn't coalesce until the 18th century.
If I was going to be disparaging, I'd say that their closest Christian analogue is the nakedly revisionist evangelical Christianity of the the American 1970s and forwards.
> If I was going to be disparaging, I'd say that their closest Christian analogue is the nakedly revisionist evangelical Christianity of the the American 1970s and forwards.
That would be disparaging to the evangelical community. Even if you find modern evangelicals to hold distasteful beliefs, and I personally do, I don't think that's an apt comparison.
A much closer analog would be the radical Mormon cults of southern Utah.
A radical version of a controversial branch of the religion.
The radical Mormon sects, to my understanding (which is limited to Under the Banner of Heaven[1]) have somewhat strong textual justifications for their practices: it's a matter of historical fact that the early Mormons were polygamists, were vitriolic racists, &c.
This is in contrast to both reactionary evangelicals (who do not make up all evangelicals) and Hasidic Jews (who are do not make up the entire Orthodox community), where both groups have largely substituted contemporary doctrine (as a conservative religious expression) for historical (and even canonical) interpretations. Compare evangelical interpretations of capitalism (and the "doctrine of wealth") to descriptions of wealth and charity thoughout both the Old and New Testaments. Similarly, Hasidic interpretation to pillars of Jewish doctrine (Pikuach Nefesh, Tikkun Olam).
That's fair, I think you're looking at it from the perspective of similar belief structure and religious doctrine. I was thinking about community size and distance from the "mainstream" beliefs of those religion, not necessarily the way in which they diverge.
> If I was going to be disparaging, I'd say that their closest Christian analogue is the nakedly revisionist evangelical Christianity of the the American 1970s and forwards.
I think the current strain, as far as Biblical interpretation is concerned, goes back to Darby's crappy-but-popular 1909 Bible, incorporating extensive same-page notes from Darby:
The 70s are just when the GOP's plan to sell itself to evangelicals, on social issues, as a deliberate ploy to capture them as a constituency to support the rest of the GOP agenda, really started to take off.
Ooooh... I am a non-US christian and been trying to understand certain things, tracked down a lot of origins for some of the more heterodox (in my view) beliefs. But never had heard of this bible, despite SEEING that bible multiple times.
After opening your link and reading more about it a lot of more things make sense and "clicked" into place.
Ultra orthodox is just another term for extremism. Extremists are not rational. Even within something that's irrational like religion they have even more absurdly irrational views.
I'm torn on whether to see this as a problem that needs solving by people outside of those communities.
I.e., the libertarian in me wants to let each community make its own choices based on their values, and then live with the resulting pros / cons.
On the other hand, those communities aren't 100% insular from surrounding society. Maybe their lower vaccination rates increase the chances of spreading the virus to outsiders who can't be vaccinated, consume extra healthcare resources, and/or increase the odds of generating a new variant that current vaccines can't stop.
The libertarian in me thinks that it’s unfair for a child to be crippled for life because of the imbecilic views of their parents. That’s where the “to each their own” philosophy breaks down for me - it assumes that children “belong” to their parents, and that it’s fair for them to have to shoulder the consequences of their parents’ decisions
Libertarianism always falters when it's up against one of the many commons we inhabit with our fellow humans. None of the single-word -ism ideologies work because the world is just too complex for us to reduce to a single way of thinking.
The isms as points on the political compass are abstractions, they don't exist and the writings of anyone associated with them are always far more complex than the one-sentence summaries.
Libertarians believe (I know that's an impossible statement, they're too heterogeneous) that people should be liable for harm they do to others, so maybe that'd be grounds for a class action.
Conversely, the libertarian in me essentially ceased to exist after personally witnessing the initial American response to the pandemic. Libertarianism works best if every individual acts selfishly in their own interest, and the number of people who chose to _not_ get vaccinated _against_ their own best interest showed me the folly of treating individual choice as paramount concern to any policy discussion.
OP is referring to a place like Chicago that has some of the strictest gun bans, is lambasted by conservative media, "look, gun bans but still high shootings," but generally fail to realize that Chicago is surrounded by areas with the loosest gun restrictions like next door Indiana. The guns just come right across state borders 5 miles away.
Guns are not banned in Chicago. There do have tighter restrictions than surrounding areas (and some of those restrictions may be unconstitutional), but many Chicagoans legally own guns.
Yes, a ban would mean you'd be a criminal by mere possession, while restrictions means you have to jump through lots of hoops in order to not be a criminal. You can legally conceal carry a gun in Chicago. And based on my conversations with several members of law enforcement as well as a few notable cases of self defense, you probably won't be charged if you have a strong self defense case, even if you happen to be unintentionally breaking a law. Such as the woman that shot a man trying to rob/rape her while she was waiting for the bus. She would have been carrying illegally by virtue of using public transit, but no charges were pressed.
They were for a very long time, but right-wing rhetoric takes decades to be updated. Most of it is recycled Ezra Pound/Eustace Mullins/John Birch shit.
And yet those states with lax gun regulations have nothing even close to the level of gun crime in the Chicago area.
If it was availability of guns that was the catalyst for this behavior, one would expect to see similar patterns elsewhere.
"Phillips County, Arkansas, with only 22,000 residents, had the nation’s highest homicide rate. Meanwhile, Cook County, Illinois (Chicago), which often captures the media’s attention around violence, had the 79th highest gun homicide rate." (https://publichealth.jhu.edu/sites/default/files/2022-05/202...)
People have no living memory of polio. Anyone who has been to or lived in a country with people who have been afflicted with polio would absolutely not have this attitude.
We need better education.
Public is becoming less and less informed.
It's heartbreaking seeing young people afflicted with polio. People who should be running around, having fun, dating, will never experience that. And I'm sure it will continue to impact them as they age.
Typical for republican congressmen, they only care about things that affected them personally. You see the same thing with republicans who suddenly have a child come out
My grandmother tells the story of the big US polio outbreak when she was a child. Her parents were scared to death, so put her on a train in Indianapolis out to Iowa to live on her grandparent’s farm . She talked about multiple towns that the train stopped in and let people disembark, but refused to allow boarding, and looking out the windows at the signs and evidence of widespread fear.
It’s not something you would forget, and she is definitely still alive ;)
Mine too! He was a first generation American, born and raised in the Bronx. Caught polio at summer camp, probably in his very early teens.
WAS IN AN IRON LUNG FOR A YEAR. HAD TO LIVE APART FROM HIS FAMILY FOR A LONG TIME. As immigrants working their way up from the sweatshops, and eventually running their own quasi-sweatshop, they could not leave to be with him through years of recuperation.
Recovered. Never ever wanted to talk about what he had been through. My dad didn’t even know until he was an older teen.
Post-polio syndrome arrived. No medications available to help, because there was no interest from companies in putting money into developing the medications, because no one was ever going to get polio again, right?
I know someone who has been sick with polio for all of her life, she's really old now. Her body is broken, although not completely paralized. That virus is a nasty piece of work.
I agree that public awareness is declining, but I don't think it's because of a lack of living memory. Almost no Americans have living memory of Ebola, but we all understand that it's very bad.
(I'm still in my mid 20s, and my adult neighbor growing up was paralyzed from the waist down from childhood polio. He was born the year before the Salk vaccine.)
My father in law, mid Boomer American of rural upbringing, got polio as a child and sustained some muscle weakness which led to him swimming for physical therapy and later becoming a competitive swimmer. It was an interesting conversation to have when COVID was a concern and vaccines were just starting to get deployed
During COVID, we podded up with our son's best friend's family, husband and wife are both highly focused specialist doctors. One of them is an allergenist (hopefully I am spelling it right), a very straight up and no-nosnese person and I recall her telling us about a woman who showed up to her office about 9 months ago trying to get an allergenic exemption from vaccine so they could turn it in at work, as she wasn't going to be able to keep the job without it. He refused to provide it, because allergic reaction to the mRNA vaccine is not a thing, and it was doubly so for her.
They're both aghast that people would be refusing proven science. My wife and I share that, although hey, Darwin awards, take yourself out from the pool if you really want to do it. It's just too bad that their behavior impacts us too.
> Maybe my reasoning is too simplistic here, but I'd think NYC was only vulnerable if they too had a poor vaccination culture.
Not the case. Vaccines aren't 100% effective. It's possible for an unvaccinated person to infect a vaccinated person. Ideally, everyone is vaccinated, and the risk becomes extremely small.
My good friend is a pediatrician in the area and frequently gets calls from mom's who ask if he does "evaluations for potential vaccine injury" - which is code for "I need a note from a doctor to have my child exempt from vaccination".
Unfortunately, their poor vaccination culture caused Measles to spread to neighboring New York City, and then across the country.