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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsKentucky teen who sued over school ban for refusing chickenpox vaccination now has chickenpox
Kentucky teen who sued over school ban for refusing chickenpox vaccination now has chickenpox
Jerome Kunkel's family has no regrets about his inaction which could have prevented the highly preventable childhood malady.
A northern Kentucky teenager banned from school for refusing the chickenpox vaccination due to his religious beliefs has come down with the childhood malady, his attorney said Wednesday.
Jerome Kunkel, a student at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Assumption Academy, first started showing chickenpox symptoms last week and hopes to have recovered by next week, a lawyer for the 18-year-old told NBC News.
Kunkel and his family have no regrets about their decision to not be vaccinated.
"These are deeply held religious beliefs, they're sincerely held beliefs," family attorney Christopher Wiest said. "From their perspective, they always recognized they were running the risk of getting it, and they were OK with it."
Some ultraconservative Catholics oppose chickenpox vaccinations because it was developed in the 1960s from cell lines of two aborted fetuses.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kentucky-teen-who-sued-over-school-ban-refusing-chickenpox-vaccination-n1003271
gopiscrap
(23,810 posts)Gothmog
(146,618 posts)gratuitous
(82,849 posts)Wouldn't it be something if one of the residual effects of catching chicken pox this late in one's teens was sterility? It would be something, that's for sure. What that something is? Well, I don't know, really. "Unfortunate" isn't quite the right word. Help me out, here.
Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)the health of others?
rpannier
(24,372 posts)I can only hope
Sherman A1
(38,958 posts)Hope he enjoys having them.......
renate
(13,776 posts)I don't think we should remove bodily autonomy from people who are sincere in their beliefs. Those beliefs may seem stupid to us, and I understand that they're putting people who can't get vaccinated at risk, which could be described as selfish... but freedom of religion is as important as freedom from religion ought to be. I don't love the idea of being forced to violate one's sincerely held beliefs.
The people I object to are the ones who are just dimwitted and easily swayed by conspiracy theories. And I suspect they outnumber those with religious objections by a factor of 10 at least.
X_Digger
(18,585 posts)His body autonomy was never at risk of being infringed.
But make stupid choices, live with stupid consequences.
Your religious choices are yours to make. The rest of us don't have to deal with the health consequences to us.