For the first time in decades there have been multiple measles outbreaks across the United States. Washington state was hit with dozens of cases, driven by the anti-vaxxer movement. A single contagious child led to 21 cases in one month, at a religiously orthodox school in Brooklyn, New York. In the latter case, it was not the orthodoxy of the religion itself driving the anti-vaxxer sentiment. Instead, misinformation surrounding the relentlessly debunked mythical connection between the MMR vaccine and autism drove the Brooklyn cases.
Patch reports that a set of around 20 anti-vaxxer parents at Green Meadow Waldorf School in Rockland County, New York, have filed a lawsuit against county officials for barring their children from school during a county-wide outbreak. Their children were unvaccinated and were held out for three months. This came after more than 124 confirmed cases of the measles hit the county over the last five months, prompting officials to move swiftly to curb the spread of the disease.
The number of confirmed cases in Rockland County is now at 145. Rockland County Attorney Thomas Humbach isn’t having any of this, releasing a statement that hits back hard at the complainants, saying his office plans on defending “this matter vigorously,” and more pointedly explaining that our Supreme Court does not “import an absolute right in each person to be, at all time and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint; and, the right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or the child to communicable disease or the latter to ill health or death.”
Humbach even questions the validity of some of the religious exemptions saying "as the case progresses, we expect several of the exemptions to be challenged, as not evincing a sincere religious belief against vaccination." Humbach’s assertion is possibly linked to the fact that while some of the schools connected to the unprecedented measles outbreaks are indeed religiously affiliated, Waldorf schools are not.