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.”

    • ivanafterall ☑️
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      35 months ago

      Believing in a God that even threatens your child with eternal torture… and still willingly worshipping him without qualms… Pretty much says it all.

      • @[email protected]
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        35 months ago

        It comes from a selfish mindset. Yes, you’re threatened, but you’re also promised with reward. It becomes a deviously simple equation at that point.

        It’s the same as being mugged in a dark alley against a wall. If you believe there’s no escape, do you acquiesce despite not wanting to give money to a robber, or do you try to fight back and get shot?

    • @[email protected]
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      105 months ago

      He can contort himself with the knowledge that he actually pulled off the sacrifice of Abraham.

  • @[email protected]
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    5 months ago

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

    Jesus, I can’t imagine being so into cult beliefs that I would have that attitude about my own kids, and actively work to make it happen sooner to boot.

    I mean sure, we all will die, but it goes against the most basic biological imperative of all living things to make sure their kids outlive them. Must be some strong Koolaid. Dude needs to fuck off with that Jonestown-isque mindset.

    • @[email protected]
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      95 months ago

      I mean, in Judeo-Christian tradition, there’s the story of Abraham willingly sacrificing his son to Yahweh until Yahweh stops him last-second. This kind of behavior is explicitly taught: nothing is more important than sky-daddy’s whims.

      • brezel
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        15 months ago

        yeah, it’s almost like theistic religions are a stupid idea :D

  • @[email protected]
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    5 months 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.

    • @[email protected]
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      15 months ago

      Untrustworthy ingredients:

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

      The uneducated will kill us all.

      • Diplomjodler
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        15 months ago

        Don’t you know that vaccines are made out of mercury and dead babies? Wake up sheeple!

        • Schadrach
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          15 months ago

          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.

      • @[email protected]
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        65 months 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…

        • @[email protected]
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          35 months 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.

          • @[email protected]
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            45 months ago

            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.

    • @[email protected]
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      25 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        5 months 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.

  • Capt. Wolf
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    5 months ago

    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!?

    • TryingSomethingNew
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      25 months ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      5 months ago

      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.

    • andyburke
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      45 months ago

      Because conservatives have been gutting education every chance they get throughout history. 🤷‍♂️

      • Capt. Wolf
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        45 months ago

        What better way to control the masses than have them all fat, exhausted, stupid, and sick?

        • @[email protected]
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          15 months ago

          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

          • Capt. Wolf
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            15 months ago

            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!

  • Lør
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    265 months ago

    He does not deserve to have kids.