South Carolina Facing a Measles Crisis
Apparently, the number of parents requesting religious exemptions from vaccines skyrocketed over the summer.
The South Carolina Department of Public Health reported that the state has 111 reported measles cases in upstate South Carolina, in the state’s northwest region.
As of Wednesday, upstate South Carolina has 27 new cases.
The location includes Greenville, Spartanburg, and Anderson.
Overall, South Carolina has reported 114 measles cases, with over 250 people in a 21-day quarantine.
Most of those in quarantine are unvaccinated children. From The Post and Courier:
Most of the new cases — 16 — were associated with the Way of Truth Church in Inman, where there were at least nine previous cases. The church, which lists no phone number, has not responded to emails from The Post and Courier.
A school in that area, Inman Intermediate, also had an exposure, and 43 students currently are quarantined there.
Of the other new cases, eight lived in a home with a known case, one was from another school exposure with a known case, one was exposed at “a health care setting” and, in one case, the source has not been identified, public health said.
Apparently, the number of parents requesting religious exemptions from vaccines skyrocketed over the summer.
The Post and Courier discovered that over “6,400 students this year are not vaccinated in Spartanburg County, where nearly all of the cases have originated.”
Leading the downward trend is Spartanburg County. A year ago, Spartanburg already had one of the lowest inoculation rates in South Carolina, at 89.9 percent. That rate has now dropped to 88.8 percent, placing Spartanburg last among all 46 counties.
Those pockets of unvaccinated children — 6,425 of them in Spartanburg alone — make a difference, experts said.
The measles virus is among the most infectious known. Even with 85 to 90 percent of kids vaccinated in a school, those who are unvaccinated become a big target for it, said Dr. Kent Stock, hospital epidemiologist at Roper St. Francis Healthcare.
“It’s going to find those kids unfortunately,” he said.
Of the 81 outbreak cases with a known vaccination status, 77 were unvaccinated and three were partially vaccinated, with only one fully vaccinated, the state’s public health officials have noted.
I also wonder how many of them are not American citizens. President Joe Biden’s administration pushed the COVID vaccine but let in anyone, and did they check their vaccine records? Probably not.
Here’s the other thing. Schools require vaccines. How are these unvaccinated kids in school!? That’s what made immigration pop into my head.
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I came here to ask the same question.
The “Way of Truth” church is described as a Pentecostal church online.
I think some people are refusing vaccines altogether because of COVID hysteria. We know that the MMR vaccine is safe and have decades of data on it. Autism cases are on the rise, but they predate innoculation protocols for MMR. Autism has only risen in the past 20-30 years and most of it is attributed to improved diagnostic criteria and screening.
Acetaminophen has entered the chat…
This is an uninformed post. Most autism cases result in people who are unable to interact normally in society. This IS NOT the result of increased screening.
I have no idea what is going on. If parents have their kids vaccinated for measles, which I recommend, then what is the crisis? Don’t the vaccines work? Who are the kids getting measles that prompted this story? I can’t believe it’s the millions of unvaccinated illegals dropped all over the country like little plague bombs by Biden doing this.
One dose of the MMR vaccine is only about 93% effective, and even two doses is only 97% effective, meaning a double-dosed kid still has a 3% chance of getting infected if exposed to the virus.
Plus there are kids who can’t be vaccinated for genuine medical reasons, such as allergies or compromised immune systems. They’re sitting ducks if a kid in their class is a carrier.
That’s the whole point of herd immunity. If everyone who can be vaccinated is, then the few who can’t be are unlikely to be exposed to it and will also survive. But the more kids who can be vaccinated aren’t, the more likely one of them will bring the virus to school and infect those who either can’t be vaccinated or who are in the 3% for whom it doesn’t work.
“Plus there are kids who can’t be vaccinated for genuine medical reasons, such as allergies or compromised immune systems. They’re sitting ducks if a kid in their class is a carrier.”
Do you put the kid in a bubble, or do you bubble-wrap the whole rest of the world?
I’m so tired of eating in restaurants that scrub their menus of gluten, nuts, seeds, milk, eggs, wheat, sesame…
This is an excellent observation. Individuals adjust and adapt to the society, organization, club they are in or that they wanted to join. Instead of this common sense approach we’ve reversed it so that everyone else is required to adjust to the individual. Somebody has a peanut allergy? How about eat some peanuts in small quantities and develop a resistance to overcome it? If not then suck it up and deal with the fact that, other than your Family and maybe a couple friends, no one else really gives two hoots about you and you have zero right to even request the rest of us to alter our lives for you, so suck it up or stay home. I’m getting to the very cynical point of thinking a temporary dystopia/hardship that we.correct after six months would do wonders to either cull the Karens or cure them.
No vaccines when I was a kid and it worked okay. Every few years measles visits the school and immunizes all the kids.
Right. If this was an epidemic of adults getting measles, I’d be concerned.
Kids? Keep on rollin’.
Huh, as a Gen X I wasn’t sure the ‘start date’ for MMR vax b/c it was already a requirement when we hit 1st grade on the leading edge in ’71. Before I looked it up just now I had thought it was a mid ’60s thing. We still had chicken pox parties to spread that but I can’t think of anyone school age who got any serious diseases.
It was mid 60’s, when I hit kindergarten.
I was a teenager in the 70’s. I remember getting shots every year at school in my elementary years. I have had the military concoction of shots. I am impervious to Anthrax and cannot catch malaria. The Red Cross examined my blood and want none of it.
Except the ones who died.
Even chicken pox can kill. I know someone whose daughter died of it.
Not to sound heartless, but there is no Disney version of The Origin of Species in which everybody lives happily ever after.
Being born is a terminal illness. Stop citing low probability exceptions. It makes you sound dumb as a democrat.
And this is how all of adults born before the age of the ubiquitous vaxx bombing acquired our immunity to measles.
Our immune systems were robust and childhood diseases were no big deal.
I am very glad to see here no wailing and wringing of hands over this. The first measles vax was in 1963 but I was 7 then and hadn’t had it. We just all got gamma globulin shots when a sibling came down with it, so mild cases all. For your average child measles is not dangerous and has certain cancer inhibiting aspects (besides life-long immunity). The down side seems mainly to be, as with chickenpox, the 2 weeks + out of school. But those who choose to not vax certainly know that needs to be handled. It also responds well to large doses of Vit A and D, as with other viruses (this is not medical advice). Sadly, few doctors seem to go in that direction for the benefit of their patients.
The severity of measles symptoms and Vit A deficiency is a well established medical fact. High dose treatment in deficient kids will ameliorate the worst symptoms.
Well nourished kids are at very little risk.
The untalked about health care crisis is the number of unvaccinated illegals, rhat Biden let in. Plus the moslem community views vaccination as an attempt to sterilize them.
The subhed answers this question: people pretending to have a religious objection to the vaccine.
This is why, before Wuhan, several states abolished the religious exemption altogether, and some others adopted a policy of demanding proof of a genuine religious objection rather than just taking the parents’ word for it.
Of course the medical establishment destroyed its credibility during the Wuhan crisis, and I imagine that itself is responsible for a significant increase in the number of uninformed parents who reason that if the doctors were wrong about Wuhan they’re wrong about this too. But they’re not.
As far as I know there is no significant religion that objects to the MMR vaccine. There may be some weird cults that do, but their numbers are small enough that if exemptions were limited to them we might be able to afford them without losing herd immunity.
What I like is the approach several Jewish schools were taking, pre-Wuhan. If parents claimed to have a genuine religious objection to the measles vaccine, then their children were excluded from the school because they were clearly not believers in the Jewish religion, which demands that we take all reasonable and ordinary precautions with our health, such as vaccinating our children against MMR.
Vax questions aside, why should a person be required to demonstrate adherence to particular doctrines as a member of a particular religious group to be granted an exemption? Court rulings aside and assuming we’re applying all the Constitutional protections can we truly require an exemption based on religion and reject an exemption based on conscience? Beliefs are beliefs and simply association with a particular religion doesn’t transform or elevate those beliefs above beliefs not derived from religion.
Obviously a private school can determine its own criteria and FWIW I like the example you provided of how some Jewish Schools operated. Wouldn’t work for a public school. Maybe not where the Jewish school is already admitting non Jewish students b/c any requirement to adhere to religion was abandoned upon admission of non Jewish Students. Even an argument that Students must be respectful of Jewish faith while at the school and thus must get the Vax might not fly b/c it would inherently apply not just on school property but throughout their lives.
You don’t need to be a member of any particular group. The criterion for constitutional protection, as well as legal protection under RFRA or similar laws, is a sincerely-held belief. You might be the only person in the world who has this belief, but so long as you do sincerely have it you’re covered.
But most people who claim religious exemptions from various laws or rules do claim membership of some specific group, so it becomes easy to determine what that group’s beliefs actually are. If you claim to be Roman Catholic, and the Pope says that religion has no objection to the Wuhan vaccine, then you can’t claim a sincere religious objection to it; whatever your objection to it is, it’s not religious.
But if you’re one of those weird Protestants who decide everything for themselves and don’t accept anyone else’s authority then it’s harder for the government to prove that you don’t sincerely hold the religious beliefs you claim to hold.
That’s exactly my point. Often we see arguments for mandatory X with the caveat of ‘oh, there’s an exemption for objections based on religion’. Yet religious doctrine isn’t required to form, hold or express a belief. Over emphasis on ‘religious exemption’ seems to have the effect of minimizing or eliminating dissent based on individual conscience.
‘Weird Protestants who decide everything for themselves’ ….so far as I am aware every major religion has differences of interpretation significant enough to create divisions to form groups of adherents who worship separately and comport themselves/aspects their lives uniquely from the rest.
I do take your meaning, there definitely are some odd sects of Christianity out there. Though in fairness ‘deciding for yourself/rejection of authority’ is kinda the shorthand basis of Protestants in general. When one believes in a direct/personal relationship with God (Trinity) there’s far less basis for/need of any intermediary of Saints or a priestly class to perform intercession on one’s behalf.
I can think of Christian Scientists, Seventh-Day Adventists, Amish, and possibly Mennonites, for four right off the top of my head, and they are clearly government “approved” religions (not that there should ever be such a thing).
Is this a crisis?
Those that got the vaccination presumably are immune.
Those that did not get a measles vaccination may catch the disease.
What is the crisis?
Those who are vaccinated still have a 3-7% chance of catching it, if they are exposed. And there are those who can’t be vaccinated, and therefore depend on herd immunity to avoid exposure.
Therefore, it would be way better for them to catch it while they are kids, and be immune to it for life, instead of taking a vaccine so they can be one of the 3-7% who catch it as adults and have serious reactions to it.
Go back to giving the MMR vaccines separately just like they used to do it. Seems like a safer option.
The story isn’t the kids catching measles or the vaccination rates. The story is that measles is nearly eradicated from the US and illegal aliens were dropped on us like plague bombs by Biden, forced into schools without any vaccinations and the result is disease. Thank you Biden
Measles came back in the USA long before the border crisis. I know a retired professor of pediatrics who was called in on a strange case about 15-20 years ago. She walked into the room, took one look at the kid, and said “that’s measles”. None of the younger doctors had ever seen a case before.
Odd single-point anecdotal evidence to support the “recurrence” of a disease on a national basis.