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.”
Hope he told his daughter she had to die to make liberals cry
The fuck
He’s Mennonite. They don’t believe in any English medicine/science. If someone dies, it’s God’s will.
I’ll never understand the position. If a deadly disease is God’s will, then so is the vaccine which prevents it.
Mennonites have no problem using blades to cut their hair, wearing glasses when their vision is faulty, or using soap after wiping their ass. Why are they against medicine?
There are many kinds of Mennonites. Most that I know are pretty scientific and well-educated.
Unpopular opinion: I actually respect this. It’s a personal decision not put upon anyone else, has nothing to do with political mis/disinformation, and is entirely consistent with the rest of their beliefs.
I don’t have to agree with them to respect how they choose to live their lives. Especially if they will keep their kids in seclusion if displaying symptoms and wear masks themselves when coming into town.
Maybe they’ll die, but that’s not my call to make, nor can I force them to live my way (nor do I want to).
Your premise is faulty. The dead child had their personal decision made for them. Its one thing to deny yourself medical care, its another thing entirely to deny a child medical care.
yeah the kid 100% had their dumbass parent’s decision ‘put upon’ them…how this is anything other than child abuse/manslaughter is beyond me - whether they’re in a fringe religious group or not, they are still killing people that didn’t have a real say in that outcome.
It’s a personal decision not put upon anyone else
Except the dead kid
what do you mean “not put on anyone else”? you think if it’s a personal decision the disease they catch becomes respectful and tries not to infect vulnerable people around them? yes it is put upon everyone else.
and that’s for adults. in this case the decision was put upon the poor little girl who needed them to shield her from the most basic preventable ailments. what other personal decision would you respect? “yeah she ran around with that kitchen knife but we decided not to interfere with god’s will.” wow parents, at least she only hurt herself with that knife, good job on not stabbing other children with it.
Except herd immunity is actually important.
I’m not into being supportive of people that want to live in the 1500s for dumb reasons.
Obviously his god didn’t want him to procreate.
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.
You know what else has stuff I don’t trust? The fucking measles.
Yeah, this fucker should be arrested, kids taken away and he should be housed in a care facility where he slowly can be weaned off the conspiracy theories until he’s normal again
Yes, I’m advocating for forced treatments of these fuckers. Hell, I’d deport and quarantine them in a remote island where they can slowly die of diseases and what not, I don’t care.
If in 2025 you still need to believe in dumb shit like unicorns, skydaddies, and conspiracy theories like a 5 year old then you don’t have the right to live liek any other healthy adult, you should be considered mentally deficient and treated as such. Sorry, you are not competent to raise children, these poor kids deserve better.
Lock em um
I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry. These people habe been ruining this world since forever and it has to stop. I’m out of are, I’m out of mercy, I’m out of patience
Downvotes from people who don’t like this authoritarian stance.
Fuck em, this is one authoritarian stance I share. If your kid dies because you made the active decision to feed them nothing but fruit, you get arrested. If your kid dies because you made the active decision to leave them in a hot car, you get arrested. If your kid dies because you made the active decision to not get them vaccines, you should be arrested.
You can only hope one day the asshole realizes he killed his kid and can’t live with his failure.
do you understand how much this would destroy someone to acknowledge? that’s why they’re doing this. they need support to dismantle modern medicine, and that support will be built from tiny little coffins.
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.
My favorite quote for situations like this is. “You’re never the enemy in your own story.”
That requires self awareness.
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.
His 5 steps of grief:
- Denial.
- Goto 1.
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.
“I don’t trust science so I will choose death instead”
Fucking brilliant people. No doubt they are Trump supporters.
… he’s a Mennonite, lot of them won’t even use the internal combustion engine. It’s one of those low-tech sects of Christianity like Amish.
That sounds worse. Good god.
Ehh, mennonites just want to keep to themselves and their communities. Obviously they’ve got some problematic beliefs, but they would never force them upon anyone or go out and try to be missionaries. Typically they don’t vote or participate in local government.
Found this interesting article about OH and PA mennonites and their opinions on the 2016 presidential election
Actually avoiding the internal combustion engine seems pretty environmentally friendly to me
Brainwashed cult, and unfortunately we don’t have time to deprogram these people
This is just so horrifying. Don’t trust? Holy shit, his child is dead!
And what is this “stuff” that he’s talking about? Midi-chlorians?
Of course he’s not changing his stance. Doing so would be admitting that his child died as a direct consequence of his own actions. Ha will forever be anti-vax from now on, even if his life depends on it.
If they’re injecting people with Midi-chlorians, I volunteer as tribute!
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!?
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.
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?
Emphasis on “stupid”.
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.
because tiny little coffins make great structural support for fascism. imagine how hard it would be to acknowledge your delusional nonsense directly killed your child. would you ever genuinely be capable of doing that? do you know anyone who would be?
buying your unwavering eternal loyalty by killing your kids. it’s great. love fascism.
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.
I think part of the problem is the MMR in the United States is associated with a medical abortion. Certain religious groups won’t take the MMR in account of that. There’s an ethical alternative but it is not commercially available in the US. It would be a good idea to make the alternative strain available here because it would help protect a segment of the population that’s otherwise exposed.
If everyone “has to die” and “God’s will” why does the pope mobile have bullet proof glass?
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?
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.
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.
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.
That was funny. I’ll have to reuse that one 🙂
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.
Well yes, if she took the vaccine she might have died.
Oh…
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!
