Rockland County Exec Punishes Jewish Constituents by Ruining Passover
The Thinking Moms' Revolution
Mar 27, 2019

[snip]

I live in upstate New York, one county away from Rockland County. My children have not been vaccinated since my about-to-be-20-year-old daughter was a baby for both religious and medical reasons.

My world was rocked yesterday when Rockland County Executive Ed Day held a press conference declaring a county-wide State of Emergency because of an ongoing measles outbreak. Starting at midnight last night, anyone under 18 who has not received a measles vaccine will be “barred from public places” for the next 30 days “or until they receive the MMR vaccination.” Parents who don’t comply will face the prospect of a $500 fine or six months in jail.

It’s Not About Public Health

Let’s be clear about this (one of Ed Day’s favorite expressions, given the number of times he used it in yesterday’s press conference): This measure is not about public health. It is about punishment, punishment for deviance from what Day and his cadre of professionals have deemed “acceptable” behavior. If this were about public health, it wouldn’t matter whether someone was not vaccinated for a religious or medical reason. In fact, those who are not vaccinated for medical reasons should be the most likely to both catch and spread measles, shouldn’t they?

Yet, as Day says, they are exempt from the order “because it’s the right thing to do.” That’s only the “right thing to do” if your real purpose is to punish the religiously exempt families. Nor, despite all of Day and company’s vaunted concern for the “most vulnerable”—infants, the elderly (who, by the way, are not vulnerable to measles as the majority gained permanent immunity when they had measles as children), and the immunocompromised—did anyone mention that live-virus vaccines like the MMR shed, making recently vaccinated children a bigger threat of infection to the “most vulnerable” than uninfected children who have not received a vaccine.

What justification did Day give for this extreme action, which as he helpfully pointed out has never been done in this country before? A total of 153 confirmed cases of measles in Rockland County since October of last year.

Of course, for anyone who remembers a time before there was a measles vaccine, the idea that 153 cases of measles over the course of six months, in a county that serves as a New York City suburb, qualifies as a “State of Emergency” is more than a little laughable. In 1962 the CDC estimates that there were three to four million cases of measles in the country, and only about ten percent of them were even reported.