One of the things that really makes me furious is when adults make decisions that endanger the lives of their children. Adults who decide to not take vaccines or other precautions that might save their lives are still behaving irresponsibly because they are posing a risk to others by being possible transmitters and lowering the heard immunity for a disease, but at least they are also risking their own lives for their beliefs, however misguided they may be.

But what is unconscionable is when they risk the health and lives of the children in their care, such as this family.

Six weeks ago, Ethan was like most 7-year-olds — spending the weekend riding his new bike or playing Minecraft on his iPad on a rainy day.

“He just learned how to ride, he got the hang of it right away,” Ethan’s dad, Luis, said proudly. “He wanted to go outside because he wanted to jump on his bike…it was an amazing thing for him.”

Instead, since late January, the schoolboy has been confined to a hospital bed with measles encephalitis, a complication that causes swelling and inflammation in the brain. “He’s pretty much as if he was paralyzed,” his devastated father, 41, told The Independent in a phone interview from his son’s hospital bedside.

Ethan’s parents decided not to immunize him against measles as they did with his three brothers. Three out of four of them contracted measles. Still, despite Ethan’s ordeal, his mom stands by their decision. “We’re not blaming God for this,” said 35-year-old Kristina. “Yes, it hurts, of course, it hurts. But God has chosen Ethan for a reason. God is doing something, and we’re gonna glorify his name regardless.

“And we wouldn’t change it any other way,” the mom continued. “If I knew this could be the outcome, I still wouldn’t have given my son the vaccine.”

“Our biggest reason why we didn’t do it is just with all the unnecessary stuff they add into it,” Kristina added, referring to her beliefs about the vaccine.

“With my own eyes, I have seen the damage it does to kids who are perfectly normal, and then once they get it, they’re not the same anymore,” she claimed.

Even after witnessing the devastating effect on her child of the disease, she says she has no regrets and would have made the same decision and not given the vaccine even if she knew this could happen. She thinks that her god has some wonderful plan for Ethan that requires him to suffer for the rest of his life. It is so mind-bogglingly callous that the only way that I can explain it is that she is forcing herself to believe this nonsense because the alternative, that she, not her god, is responsible for Ethan’s suffering because she could have saved him this agony by simply giving him the vaccine, is too horrible for her to contemplate.

About 1 child out of every 1,000 who get measles, which has no cure, will go on to develop encephalitis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The condition can result in permanent brain damage and is fatal in 10 to 15 percent of those cases.
…

Dr. Linda Bell, South Carolina’s state epidemiologist, said the MMR shot is one of the safest and most well-studied for safety concerns of any modern vaccine.

“The MMR vaccine itself contains a weakened measles virus that stimulates the immune response but does not cause disease, as well as stabilizers like sugar, amino acids and gelatin, and small amounts of protein and antibiotic,” Bell told The Independent.

“It does not contain mRNA, aluminum, preservatives like thimerosal, or fetal tissue. The ingredients contained in the MMR vaccine are only there to promote a robust immune response and provide lifelong immunity from the potentially devastating effects of measles infection,” Bell continued.

“Measles encephalitis is a well understood, well documented outcome of measles infection which can be fatal or lead to lifelong complications from brain injury; complications which may require lifelong care and treatment,” Bell said. “By contrast, the MMR vaccine does not cause this same outcome.”

While I have sympathy for the grief that any parent would feel when their children suffers from a devastating medical condition, I also feel a sense of rage against them on Ethan’s behalf, who has been deprived of his childhood and possibly his life because they would not give him one of the safest vaccines known that would have prevented it because of who knows what ridiculous thing they heard from who knows who on the internet. His mother objected to the “stuff” they put into vaccines but as a result, now her child is having vast amounts of other “stuff” put into him by doctors trying to rescue him from the encephalitis.

I also feel rage against RFK Jr and Trump and all the other vaccines skeptics that have been elevated to high positions in the public health community who have done so much to feed the anti-vaccine sentiment that has put so many people at risk, with measles cases surging. Thanks to them, vaccine misinformation is proliferating, and social media influencers (I am starting to really hate that class of people) are able to mislead countless numbers of people.