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.”
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.
Ah yes, the Electric Amish.
That was funny. I’ll have to reuse that one 🙂
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…
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.
Even the first 5 commandments seem to be coming from a place of narcissism for an omnipotent being - you worship me and only me, don’t worship anything else, including idols and graven images, and don’t use my name the wrong way. Oh, and make sure you keep my special day…this has what to do with any kind of morality?
The rest are reasonable things that could be derived w/o any appeal to mythology - don’t kill, steal, lie, cheat on your spouse and covet another’s possessions.
I will never understand when someone from one of the Abrahamic religions tells me that without religion, people have no foundation in morality [1]. The very core set they most reference are about 50% irrelevant to morality, the other 50% are something every society puts in place and they don’t need Jehovah to derive these rules; they are rather obviously necessary to a functioning society - although that last one our entire system is set up to almost force people to covet things and other people all the time, so that’s rather ironic.
As for all the other stuff - the various rules and rituals - that people tend to build up around the three main Abrahamic religions…a lot of it truly does make me scratch my head.
[1] I just saw one of those magamaniacs arguing for that with Sam Seder. That video was excruciating by the way, but I did power through most of it.
We gonna rock down to, Electric Amish Avenue.
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.
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.
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Untrustworthy ingredients:
The measles virus, but very slightly modified so it won’t kill you.
The uneducated will kill us all.
Don’t you know that vaccines are made out of mercury and dead babies? Wake up sheeple!
Don’t you know that vaccines are made out of mercury
Some childhood vaccines contained thimerosal which is a mercury compound as a preservative prior to 2001, some other drugs still use it and it’s very probably harmless but technically any drug containing thimerosal contains mercury.
and dead babies?
Is the common measles vaccine in the US one of the ones that is developed using a cell line originated from an aborted fetus? Like it doesn’t contain any fetal cells in the final product, but technically it wouldn’t be entirely a lie to say it’s made from a dead baby (without getting clinical and drawing a developmental line before which it’s not a “baby” per se), since the media it is grown it is a cell line descended from one…
Kind of like how there are skin treatments made from circumcised foreskins - it doesn’t actually contain foreskin, but it contains a compound extracted from cell lines produced from infant foreskin removed during circumcision, because that’s the easiest way to legally get baby skin. Usually they’ll refer to containing CTFG or epidermal growth factors or something along those lines.
So basically he’d rather they just die than live with “stuff we don’t trust”. If “everybody has to die”, then why care about what’s in a vaccine in the first place? Extreme cognitive dissonance to support an ideology.
I’m not entirely certain, but depending on which Mennonite community they belong to, they might believe that reaching their desired afterlife requires faithful adherence to their religious practices and commitments.
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If “everybody has to die”, then why care about what’s in a vaccine in the first place?
Yeah, couldn’t the vaccine side effects be “God’s will” as well?
Yeah… You totally can’t trust a vaccine with 97% efficacy and a negligible mortality rate that’s existed for over 80 years versus an extremely infectious virus with a 40% mortality rate and no effective treatment or cure… If only there were extensive scientific studies on these things that were easily and freely accessible to the public! Why do we have to live in such a dark and uninformed time!?
Because conservatives have been gutting education every chance they get throughout history. 🤷♂️
What better way to control the masses than have them all fat, exhausted, stupid, and sick?
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Damn, I’m fat, exhausted, and sick right now because I’ve had bronchitis for the past 2 weeks.
Although I’m not a conservative and I’m arguably not stupid so I have that going for me at least lol
The stupid part is the biggest factor, the rest just wears you down until you’re like “Okay… Just do whatever so I can get out of this.”
Hope you get better soon!
Sorry about the bronchitis. You’re probably sick of sipping warm drinks by now but keep it up, you’re at Mile 21 and ready to make a turn for the better.
One small correction. 20-25% require hospitalization, In the third world 1% to 3% mortality rate, in the first world typically 1-in-1000, but note that at least two have died of that initial group that was infected (125?).
Go get vaxxed, dammit.
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Hope he told his daughter she had to die to make liberals cry
You know what else has stuff I don’t trust? The fucking measles.
Stuff, you say. I’d wager this fool knows nothing at all about this supposed stuff.
He’s a Mennonite. He’s intentionally ignorant of the modern world and murdered his daughter.
Dude has to cope this hard to justify how he and his family killed their daughter.
You can only hope one day the asshole realizes he killed his kid and can’t live with his failure.
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Good, people thrive when they can acknowledge their failures. I hope he gets pushed into mind breaking anguish I want him to be pushed to his emotional limits and either do mankind a favor and remove himself or reforge himself better.
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My favorite quote for situations like this is. “You’re never the enemy in your own story.”
I don’t think he will. I think he’s lying to himself to avoid the feeling of shame and he needs that protection. He can’t let himself ever admit what he did.
That requires self awareness.
Eh, deep down i think these fuckers know. McDonald’s only haf stuff inside i trust. I know everything that is in aspirin. It’s all bullshit.
His 5 steps of grief:
- Denial.
- Goto 1.
He will just rape his wife and make another hate -baby.
Problem solved.
Makes sense, what if she took the vaccine and it killed her? Oh, wait…
These people should be in prison for murder and forcibly sterilized.
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Fucking deathcult of america.
He should have died too
Actually no, instead of.
I bet he was given the measles vaccine.
He’s a Mennonite, so probably not
The conundrum here is that admitting his stance was wind would take a level of intelligence that would have had him vaccinate his child in the first place.
I know that’s oversimplifying it, but the point still stands.
At this point, I can’t say I would blame him for still refusing to accept it on an emotional level despite all evidence otherwise. As stupid as it is, how might you cope with knowing you are the sole reason that your daughter is dead? That if it weren’t for your arrogance, you would still have a child?
I don’t agree with it, but I understand. I don’t think I could live with myself if I accepted reality if I were in his situation. Shutting down might be his method of coping. It is a sad situation that was easily preventable.
This is why it’s easier to fool someone than to convince them they’d been fooled.
They don’t want to admit they were wrong and taken for a ride. It’s embarrassing, it’s humiliating. They would rather carry their misconceptions to the grave than admit they are incorrect.
It’s a vicious cycle that at least 30% of Americans are going through.
This shit ought to be considered negligence and reason to at least remove any other kids from the home. Poor six year old was failed by her family and the state.
everybody has to die >
But not that young and not from a preventable disease.
Ah yes, the “everybody dies so who gives a shit” defense…
He says he doesn’t trust it, but he’s lying. If he actually cared about what’s in the vaccines, he would get educated on the ingredients, the process of manufacture, the data and studies that have been done, etc.
But he won’t do that, because he is a religious fundamentalist. He doesn’t care about being logical, or reasonable, or understanding anything. He heard a certain viewpoint that he vibes with and stubbornly and fanatically holds to it.
Same as radical Islamists, or the Crusaders, or conspiracy theory nuts. They didn’t reason themselves into their worldview. It wasn’t carefully and methodically researched, it isn’t something they are willing to change or adapt or be wrong on.
Crusaders
Wasn’t that more of a “make money fast” scheme though?
Sure, but for many of the participants, the actual ground troops, they were Christian fanatics that genuinely believed God was behind their cause.
Same story as today really, smart people at the top use religious fundies as useful idiots to help their cause.
I grew up in a Christian fundamentalist community. Most of the people in it genuinely believed all the propaganda and rhetoric. But the right-wing powers at the top usually don’t actually give a shit, a bunch of them don’t even believe in any of the fundie stuff like the imminent rapture, Revelation, Prophesy, etc. But they know they can use that fanaticism to their advantage to push their agenda forward.
