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Texas officials report that an unvaccinated child has died of measles
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- Title
- Unvaccinated Child Dies of Measles in Texas, Officials Say
- Published
- Feb 26 2025
- Word count
- 406 words
Those poor parents. No one deserves for their child to die.
All these folks really think that they’re doing whats best for their kid.
People like RFK jr who tell them that not vaccinating your kid is acceptable should rot in hell. Him and people like him have made a political platform out of convincing parents to abuse their children.
I'm torn on this.
I would certainly agree that no child deserves to die because of their parents' ignorance, but at what point are the parents responsible for making a conscious decision that directly caused the death of their child. I understand they were lied to, but at what point is lack of critical thinking the fault of others.
It makes me think of plethora of Republicans right now surprised they are losing their jobs, the cost of their eggs is going up, or they're being deported. Sure they were also lied to, but I have a hard time feeling bad for the people who voted for the party of 'personal responsibility' when leopards eat faces.
To add, the claims aren't that these traditional vaccines don't work, but that they cause autism. Under this false belief, these parents are still deciding they'd rather have a dead child than one with autism. It makes me sick.
Yeah, honestly I still don't even understand why autism is worse than death. Plenty of people live quite fine lives with autism. I really don't understand what's so horrible about it.
The kind of autism you're picturing and the kind of autism they're picturing are probably incredibly different. It's a particularly unhelpful diagnosis when it can range from "someone who is living a normal, successful life but comes across as kind of weird socially" to "someone who can't speak, has no fine motor control, and can never live independently".
Whether being unable to communicate, or understand and cope with the world is preferable to death I can't say, I'm just in the "kind of weird socially" space, and I'm sure as hell going to vaccinate my kid, but I could see why a parent would think a small chance at being ill is preferable to what they believe is a certainty at being significantly disabled.
This exactly. An acquaintance of mine's child is in that category -- non-verbal, extremely violent, with the intelligence of maybe a three year old. He should really be institutionalized, as he has tried to kill his siblings. When he gets adult strength, I don't know what they are going to do.
While on the topic of people who deserve rotting in prison/hell… The honestly hard to believe factor in this timeline is that the "vaccine = autism" misinformation is both so recent, and can be traced to a single point of origin.
And hilariously enough, he lives outside Austin - so any gun loving Texas has a second amendment solution to his campaign of terrorism! Good thing he tortured all those children only to lie about the results anyway.
I had the recent realization that pretty much everyone making a decision to not vaccinate their children for measles are themselves vaccinated against measles and have a theoretical lifetime protection against it.
It's some next level "pulling the ladder up behind you" to benefit from mass vaccination against a deadly illness with an R0 far worse than COVID, and then deliberately opt your children out of that protection.
It highlights how illogical most people are and how susceptible to propaganda. People were very upset that they had to get covid shots when they joined the military, but didn’t complain about all the other shots and tests everyone has been given for decades.
I don’t think this is a problem of critical thinking. I think it’s a problem of trust. These parents trusted people who said “vaccines bad”. That doesn’t absolve them of their responsibility in this case, but it doesn’t really help anyone for us to keep demonizing them. They’ve already been punished with the death of their child.
A much better question to worry about is why they trust the anti-vax people more than people who actually know what they’re talking about. And I’m more than welcoming the scorning of people who push those dangerous claims like RFK Jr, who are clearly part of the problem.
Why not both? I was told many things coming up that would have been easier to believe, but ended up not being true or at the very least gross oversimplifications. We didn't have the Internet to instantly fact check things so more rigorous research and discussion was required. I resisted many ideas that conveniently explained complicated issues including things like all Indians (indigenous) are alcoholics without discussions of generational trauma and residential schools, like MLMs and the suspiciously triangle shape of their organisations, like how women belong barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen without thought to them having any opinions or agency... and most recently about COVID and the jab without any curiosity about why, if it was poison for the sheeple, were all the rich, powerful and politicians clamoring to be first in line to get it.
I lost several friends along the way to these rabbit holes, to reactionary thinking and the demonization of others, being immigrants, the poor, women, authority, etc. It is on some level a lack of critical thinking. Of questioning what you're told. Who is the authority telling them to question other authorities?
I also realize you likely agree with alot of this and I do get your larger point about it coming from an outside source, from an authority on the matter, and they are largely to blame.
I truely feel it comes down to education, and the same people pushing these lies are the same demonizing public schools and pushing for charter schools and school choice like PragerU. The kinds of people who stand to directly benefit both financially and culturally from the degradation of social norms, regulations and critical thinking in general; grifters, con artists, billionaires, capital owners. But that feels like a different discussion.
Yes, I do agree with you about a lot of this.
But let me put this another way. I think there are two mistakes commonly made by left-leaning people. The first is that they treat people on the right like they're idiots. They are not. They are making decisions that seem to make the most sense from their perspective. But often we treat them like they're mules or chickens; like they're being dumb because it's their nature. It's not just the people loudly proclaiming their ineptitude that bother them, but the assumption that they could have made better decisions but were just not smart enough to realize that the world they operate in is a fantasy. This is part of why the "own the libs" mentality is so strong to them; "they're finally getting what's coming to them".
The second mistake that leftists make is that they tend to see the internet as if it were some monolith representing the entirety of human life. We talk about filter bubbles but we don't realize that even if we just spend a lot of time on one particular social network, that's a bubble regardless of there being an algorithmic filter on it or not.
What I am trying to say is that these people have a model of how the world works, the same as you or I do. Just like us, they have no choice but to assume it's correct. If they get information to the contrary they don't just reject it because it's convenient, but because if they were to accept it it would be agonizing. They will have to re-evalutate even their own self-image, possibly having to come to terms with the fact that their assertion that they are a good person might not be true. So part of why people look to these bad authorities is because they are looking for people who reinforce their world view. It's the reason why people like Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate get attention in spite of being terrible people. "They can't be that bad, they also believe my deeply personal beliefs!" But this is not a dumb person thing, this is a human thing. Every single person does this.
So I guess you could say it's a problem with education, but I think it's perhaps more closely an issue of epistemology, or at least to how people determine what they think is true. Giving more money to public schools will not solve those deeper issues.
I appreciate this. I feel like maybe we're talking about two different things though.
Firstly, growing up I would have been considered right wing. As I matured and had a child I learned empathy and took a much more centrist position, though given the Overton window shifting right I'm sure I come off as a raging commie now.
I'm neither a Democrat or American. I consider the current position of the right wing in America as full authoritarian. Democrats are about as pro corporation, centrist status quo as they could get.
When you say 'left-leaning people' i don't know if you're counting me in that categorization or are speaking more broadly. There are plenty of conservative ideas I can get behind but when "owning the libs" takes the form of celebrating Nazi salutes and genital inspections in middle schools then I think they've completely lost the plot.
I completely agree with this and understand the difficulty. It in no way makes them not wrong or not bad people mind you (or in the context of this thread, their child not dead), just that they let identity politics become such an integral part of their personality that it's easier to stay the course than engage in any meaningful self-reflection.
This is where I disagree. I used to listen to Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan and I did agree with alot they said. As they strayed more away from their positive messaging, I started to stray from them. I don't look for a hugbox, I look to be challenged, because I realize no one has all the answers including myself. If that curiosity isn't human then so be it.
Look, if you're arguing for a way to change hearts and minds, to make a difference culturally and politically, then you're absolutely right, expressing these sentiments won't do that, it'll make them dig in deeper, which is how America is where it is today. So... Do you have any thoughts on how 'left-leaning' people could do it right? Because I don't have any ideas.
If you've ever wondered why people don’t change their minds in the face of overwhelming facts, there are two books that I read last year that I think answer the question better than anything else I've seen. I've mentioned them before. The first is How Minds Change by David McRaney and the second is Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein. In short, more often than not, belief change isn’t about logic—it’s about identity.
As Klein writes,
Klein explains that political and social beliefs are tied to group identity, meaning changing your mind often feels like betraying your community and, more to the point, risking exile from it. This is why people resist facts that challenge their group's views. McRaney digs even deeper into the psychology, showing that traditional debate fails because of motivated reasoning, the backfire effect, and identity-protective cognition. Instead, real change happens from self-reflection that only happens when we don't feel threatened (psychologically on an individual level as well as in the sense of our status in our social groups). Rather than bombarding people with facts, McRaney uses the example of "deep canvassing" (and similar techniques like "street epistemology") to show techniques that are shockingly effective at changing people's minds by connecting an issue to their own experiences, provoking reductions in cognitive dissonance. Further, a great example referenced repeatedly in the book is how public opinion on gay marriage shifted rapidly—not because of better arguments, but because the broader culture changed and it didn't feel like a betrayal of group identity to change stance on the issue.
So how do we make it so that vaccination isn't politicized and therefore linked to group identity? I wish I knew. It's going to require powerful forces within conservatism itself to do that. (To say nothing of the generally left-leaning "wellness" community.)
McRaney, towards the end, says,
Yes, I was talking generally. I don't know you well enough to know how you think. And yes, I also agree that "falling in with the wrong crowd" doesn't take away culpability for their actions.
There's no "right" way to change hearts and minds. But perhaps attempting to change them is the biggest mistake? After all, the more you tell someone that they're wrong, the less likely they will be to listen to you. My only answer is that such people should be made to feel included, taken seriously, and not made to feel infantilized. In other words, just give them simple respect and understanding. Maybe take a bit more effort to try to understand what they are saying, which is hard because like everyone on the planet, it's not necessarily the literal words coming out of their mouths.
And to further complicate things, what someone might say is the reason for their deeply personal beliefs is rarely their actual reason.
The way I think about this sort of thing is that yes, the parents are to blame, but the natural penalty for this sort of neglect of duty is random, usually fairly minimal (most kids who get measles recover) and, rarely, far too harsh.
Contrary to the glee sometimes seen about this sort of thing on r/leopardsatemyface, that ain't justice. It's a severe injustice and that's nothing to cheer about. Nature is cruel, unless we can do something about it.
So what should the justice system do to the parents? Nothing. They've suffered more than enough already.
According to this Infectious Diseases Society of America article:
"Complications occur in 3 in 10 who get measles, and young children are especially vulnerable. Ear infections and diarrhea are the most common, but as many as 1 in 20 will get pneumonia; about 1 in 1,000 will have brain swelling that can cause deafness and intellectual disability; and nearly 3 in 1,000 will die."
Those risks feel more serious to me than you're presenting them but I haven't looked into it further than a quick Google search and a strong recommendation from my pediatrician to get my own kid vaccinated (which I did).
I get no glee from these stories and am not a frequenter of face eating subreddit (at least since the IPO and my jump to Tildes), the connection was a tangent and I probably could have left out my second paragraph entirely.
That said your question about justice is a good one. If their child dies should there be charges laid? I agree that the death of a child is already probably enough of a punishment. What if later they lose a second child? Or a second child gets brain swelling and an intellectual disability? If the neighbors kids dies from measles and they still don't vaccinate? I don't have a good answer to these, but at some point this feels like child endangerment and criminal.
Drunk driving is very frequently harmless. Many people genuinely hold a belief they aren't meaningfully impaired. If they were involved in a fatal accident, a large percent of people would suffer great remose for what they'd done.
Or, more to the point, if a parent is driving drunk and only kills their own kid should they not be sentenced because of their grief? Should a secretly reluctant parent who resents their child be punished more harshly? How should you handle split custody, where one parent blocked the vaccination? For me the intuition about whether suffering should absolve one of criminal liability is that it shouldn't, much. The kid ain't unkilled.
It's a separate matter what sorts of parenting policies ought to be required or constitute abuse/neglect. You might find parents that raise kids with unhealthy diets lead to lifelong health issues or earlier death, but except in the extremes I don't think many people want the gov't deciding what their kids eat.
You know my dad?
I guess this reflects on a deeper question: what is the purpose of putting consequences to lawbreaking? For example, I’m personally not on board with “punishment and retribution” as the answer to that question, but I know a lot of people who might think that is the purpose.
For myself, I think a very small part of it is to disincentivise people who might be on the fence about deliberate and considered lawbreaking, but I think the biggest reason should be to rehabilitate or isolate people from society who don’t or can’t “play nice” with the rest of society.
From this lens, if that person is already deeply remorseful of the death of their child, then I don’t think there are any legal consequences that can alter their behaviour for the better.
Of course, if their attitude was “oh well that’s a bit unfortunate but I’ll continue this behaviour in future anyway” then yeah there might be cause for legal consequences.
So then the question is really: What percentage of parents who lose a child to preventable illness change their mind about vaccinations thereafter? Depending on the answer to that, we'd be able to make better decisions on whether adding additional consequences matters for that parent.
But that's only half the question. The child is still dead of something that could have been prevented. The other half of the question is whether mandatory vaccination with no non-medical exemptions would have saved that kid, and the answer to that one is fairly straightforward.
Yeah, completely agree with your full comment here but especially this second half. The reason I think legal consequences maybe shouldn’t be leveraged is because I think this other direction is better — rather than punishment after the fact, I think it’s better to set up the right incentive structures that even someone who doesn’t believe in vaccines decides the benefits outweigh the potential downsides. Maybe that’s adding bonuses (e.g. tax benefits) or taking them away (e.g. levies or surcharges) or something else entirely, but I definitely prefer structuring incentives around the wanted behaviour to work much more effectively at population-scales
A 3 in a 1000 chance does seem fairly "rare" to me, but of course even rare risks of death should be taken very seriously. That's certainly not a risk I want to take.
And for the less severe risks, if 1 in 5 are hospitalized, that means 4 of 5 aren't. This could result in survivor bias from people who had measles, but it wasn't that bad for them.
Schools do require vaccinations, even in Texas. However, there is apparently a high rate of exemptions - one in five. Maybe they should grant fewer exemptions?
Agreed. 99.7% chance of things being ok. But I feel like we (humans) also often learn the wrong lesson when we do something with a small probability of a catastrophic outcome and then that outcome doesn’t happen. Like the drunk driving example above. I’ve known people who thought they were “good” at driving buzzed because they hadn’t gotten in a wreck. Doesn’t mean they aren’t engaging in high risk behavior.
In the case of vaccinations and drunk driving, our choices also put other people at risk.
We’re talking about diseases where we need high immunization rates to avoid spreading them to people who can’t be vaccinated. With a big outbreak, it’s only a matter of time before someone like that does because of other parents’ choices.
If only humankind could invent some sort of medical intervention that would prevent children from suffering from risky diseases like measles.
Its really difficult to make the right choice when the basis for every choice you make is a distrust of authority, and you see doctors as authority.
Imagine the only information you hear is that vaccines are harmful to your children. Thats the reality that they’re living in.
They did what they thought was right, this death is on the spreaders of misinformation.
The spreaders of the lies (misinformation is too weak of a term) are at least partially responsible, but the parents are also ultimately the most culpable. Parents who intentionally starve or beat their children to death, for example, are still responsible for their deaths, even if they believe it was the right thing to do.
I don’t think the consequences of not getting vaccinated is as clear to them as the consequences of not feeding your child.
I wish it was, and I think it should be, and both are absolutely abuse and should be criminalized but you’ve got otherwise perfectly loving parents out there denying their children healthcare because the media is telling them not to trust doctors and the actual friggin president of the united states is supporting that rhetoric.
This is no longer an individual criminal act, this is a systemic issue of the elite class purposely pushing lies in order to get parents to let their children die horrific deaths.
Just because it's not clear to the people who willfully ignore and choose to not believe the evidence doesn't mean it's not clear. To a Jehovah's Witness, it is not clear that denying your child a life-saving blood transfusion will kill them. To another religious group, it may not be clear that prohibiting any medical care at all is dangerous. Willfully and consciously choosing to ignore all evidence and reality is a choice that these people are choosing to make, and they are 100% responsible for that choice and its consequence. I agree with your other points, though.
You’re talking about people who think that denying their kids medical care that results in their death is the same as my personal choice to not bring a child into this world.
When I get upset, and try to explain to them that yes whooping cough will kill their toddler, they laugh and tell me to stop being dramatic about their personal choice.
They really do not understand. I cant make them understand. People like RFK and Trump are holding positions of power and telling them that this is okay to do and anyone who gets angry at them for doing it wants to take away their freedom of personal choice.
I don’t think its fair to expect joe sho coffee shop owner to know how vaccines work, to be educated enough to know that Trump lies to them, and if we start throwing them in jail for what they have been told by people in positions of authority is their personal choice, we’re not going to convince them.
What will convince them is removing these people from power and denying them the platforms that they use to lie to Americans. What will convince them is putting people who actually know what the fuck they’re talking about and actually want to help Americans in those positions of power and giving them a platform to tell joe schmo coffee shop owner that his toddler will die if they are not vaccinated.
But everyone willing to be in that position of authority has been a fucking coward for the past 20 years so here we are.
I have never in my life, not even once, taken it into my own hands to look up the evidence regarding vaccines. I trust my friends and family to have my best interests at heart, and I trust my medical professionals to give me advice on how to be my most healthful self.
But let’s say for a moment that I had some doubts, and decided to jump on the internet, this bastion of truth and collection of all human knowledge that people keep singing praises. What do you think I might find on the internet if I started to ask questions, and “do my own research” or to “look at the evidence” — if I keep an open mind to whatever I might find, what conclusions do you think I might come to, that the internet might provide me?
My questions here are rhetorical because I strongly believe that the internet (at the very least, the way the vast vast majority of internet users would choose to use it) will lead a person towards antivax “evidence and research” much sooner than it would lead me to genuine research. For one thing, even if I was led to genuine scientific research, those papers are basically unintelligible for anyone outside the medical academic world.
I’m pretty sure I hold the same worldview that you do, or at least societally and politically our views align, but the purpose of this comment is to draw attention to the fact that I believe you’re using science/evidence/research as a shortcut for looking down on people you disagree with.
This comment feels like the same thing, but towards me. I don't appreciate that, but I'll move past it. I'll probably be deleting my account and comments soon, anyway, so it doesn't really matter. "Disagree" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here - I suppose I do "disagree" with them, the same way I "disagree" with people who believe in antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Trust me, I take no pleasure in "looking down on them". It's not fun growing up in that type of environment. I was raised by people like this, and I've seen first hand how they actively reject all evidence that contradicts their beliefs. They admit it themselves. It's willful. The belief comes first, and they choose to adapt everything they see to match it. It's almost more of an identity. I think this is something people who didn't experience it first hand/up close don't fully understand.
Maybe I'm testy about this subject because it's all too close to me. Maybe I'm just being too optimistic in assuming any notable percentage of the population is able to critically think and examine their own beliefs. Maybe I'm wrong in believing that these people should be held accountable for their choices here, but in that case, if they're really incapable of understanding things and making an informed decision, I do not see a way out that does not involve taking away their agency or limiting free speech in some capacity. (That said, you almost certainly look down on others for their beliefs - almost everyone looks down on flat earthers, for example.)
I certainly used to, but it was something in myself that I didn’t like, so I’ve tried to change that about myself.
Nowadays I think it’s probably correct to say that I look down on the “totem” of flat earthers that I’ve constructed in my own head, but any actual real person I meet who holds those beliefs, I try first to understand why they believe what they do, and then if I think there’s a possibility of changing their minds, I try to introduce enough doubt that they become curious again and hopefully find their own path to what I believe to be true.
Jumping away for a bit… Throughout primary school and high school, I was definitely bright enough to mostly cruise through without really applying myself, and definitely identified as atheist (albeit quietly to myself and to a small number of people I trusted) while going through religious schools even from a pretty young age. This definitely gave me a kind of intellectual arrogance that may have been warranted (I genuinely was smart enough to run rings around some of my teachers when I was in the wrong kind of mood) but also I now believe made me a shitty person to be around.
Some experiences in university helped me break that down — partly I found myself humbled by how quickly subjects got genuinely difficult for myself and I needed to apply myself like high school never required, and partly by meeting people who were as smart and arrogant compared to me as I was compared to my peers in high school.
One in particular I met in my early 20s, and although we were similar age, I was struggling with my undergrad while he had already completed his PhD because his parents were wealthy enough to fast track his schooling to keep up with his abilities. I believe he started his undergrad at age 16 or 17, and genuinely was very rarely incorrect about anything, so he was definitely smart enough to justify his arrogance. It just also made him a shitty person to be around, and at some stage (probably a few years later, after we fell out of contact and went our separate ways) I decided I didn’t want to be that kind of person to other people anymore.
I probably should have made it clearer that the reason I was drawing attention to what I identified in your comment was not to have a dig at you, so I’m sorry that I wasn’t clearer in that way, and I’m sorry that it came off as an attack. If anything, my intention was to draw attention to it so that you could decide for yourself if that’s the person you want to come off as; if so, then we simply have different priorities, but if not then that might be something to think on. For myself at least, self reflection isn’t easy, so I always value external views on how I come across. I’ve probably projected that onto you, so if this is unwelcome, then I apologise and retract it.
Not to mention paywalled.
...i wonder whether people who haven't personally experienced that disinformation sphere truly understand just how pervasively it saturates every aspect of what that population sees, hears, reads, watches, listens, discusses, and teaches amongst themselves, in self-reinforcing, innoculating fashion...most of these folks truly don't know any better; they've been conditioned for decades to believe that they're on the side of righteous truth and to discredit any information to the contrary as malicious conspiracy against them...
...this is the elephant in the room our society hasn't been willing to confront for the past thirty years: suppression of free expression, and i fear that nothing less is capable of stopping it, with all the ugliness that entails...
This was murder. RFK Jr. and every other official pushing vaccine conspiracies belong in prison.
If parents can be imprisoned for child abuse and negelct causing death for forcing a vegan diet on their babies, then parents should definitely be imprisoned for not getting life-saving vaccines for their children.
10000000% agree and I think the people who refuse to make that a crime are cowards.
Yeahhh.. that's what you get.
Heartbreaking to have kids suffer from a misguided political view. It's so preventable too..
I really wonder if we'll have to restrict flight passages from the USA at some point. With the bird flue and this, paired with the chaos, it's such a powder keg waiting to explode I can't even laugh at the absurdity of the situation anymore.
Honestly the rest of the world should be threatening us. Imagine a world where the US incubates a new pandemic on a regular basis. Every other country would demand to put virologists on our soil.
As much as I'd love for that to happen... uhrm... vaguely gestures at the rest of world
Yeah, ain't gonna happen. :'D
Mirror: https://archive.is/v4b8a
Mom of child dead from measles: “Don’t do the shots,” my other 4 kids were fine
That poor child. They deserved so much better.
How can someone be so indoctrinated that even the death of their own child won’t convince them.
They were Mennonites. Beyond the political, this was religious fervor. It's very difficult to break that programming when the end result is always going to be "what god would have wanted".
measles outbreak now includes 30 cases in new Mexico, Death