Summary

A father whose unvaccinated six-year-old daughter became the first U.S. measles death in 10 years remains steadfast in his anti-vaccine beliefs.

The Mennonite man from Seminole, Texas told The Atlantic, “The vaccination has stuff we don’t trust,” maintaining that measles is normal despite its near-eradication through vaccination.

His stance echoes claims by HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., who initially downplayed the current North American outbreak before changing his position under scrutiny.

Despite his daughter’s death, the father stated, “Everybody has to die.”

  • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 month ago

    It takes a special kind of crazy to say vaccines have untrustworthy ingredients over the dead body of your unvaccinated child.

    Mennonite man

    Ah… right okay.

      • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Haha, never heard that one, and I grew up in an area that had a lot of both. 🤣

        I was always amused by some of the stuff that Amish would do - like buying a freezer for an “English” neighbor, as an example. Or sometimes borrowing/renting someone else’s tractor and then running them at night? Are you hiding these behaviors from your god, or just from other people?

        Lots of crazy beliefs out there. Look into eruvs for Orthodox Jews or how they pay “gentiles” to do things for them on holy days, or the timers that are set up…I think Religulous showed this last one. Seems like if you are going to go to these lengths to supposedly stay within compliance on some arbitrarily-determined rules from centuries ago, you might consider just, uh, discarding and revising some of these things? Because an omniscient being is going to see right through these clever legalisms…

        • Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
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          1 month ago

          There’s an expression: “build a hedge around the Torah,” referring to the web of extra strictures beyond the basic Commandments, that exist solely because they know people will finagle ways around them. The idea being that by breaking those rules they’ll still be protected from breaking the big ones. Of course it just means that more obedient people live restricted lives, and holier-than-thou people smugly keep stupid rules while still being cruel and evil to the core. And cheaters gonna cheat.

    • rusticus@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      Untrustworthy ingredients:

      The measles virus, but very slightly modified so it won’t kill you.

      The uneducated will kill us all.

    • Ha, I got interested in researching what exactly Mennonites are, and funnily, the German Wikipedia article has, in its very introduction, this disclaimer:

      In den Medien gibt es immer wieder Berichte über Mennoniten in Nord- oder Südamerika, die einen sehr konservativen bis weltabgewandten Lebensstil pflegen und die in der Regel einen deutschen Hintergrund haben. Diese Gruppen stellen jedoch nur einen kleinen Ausschnitt aus dem mennonitischen Spektrum dar, in dem es auch viele modernere, angepasstere und liberalere Gemeinschaften sowie viele andere ethnische Zugehörigkeiten gibt.

      Translation by me:

      “In the media, there are regular reports about Mennonites in North- or South America, who have a very conservative or even withdrawn lifestyle, who usually have German ancestry. These groups are, however, only a small section of the whole Mennonite spectrum, in which there are also many more modern, more adjusted and more liberal communities, as well as many other ethnicities.”

      Seems like your American Mennonite exiles are making the rest of the Mennonite world defensive.

      • CompostMaterial@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        I mean, that’s just the history of the US anyway. Remember, the puritans were “escaping” “persecution” for there religious beliefs from Europe. Those beliefs were so incredibly strict, conservative, and restrictive that no one wanted those nut jobs around. Oh, look, 250 years later and their descendants are still afraid of a nipple.