The Fight Over COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates Is Coming To Kids Next
It took a small town chiropractor named Charles Brown to help vaccinate millions of kids for decades to come — all because he didn’t want to vaccinate his own.
It was 1979 in Houston, Mississippi, and Brown needed to enroll his 6-year-old son in school. But state law required the boy to be vaccinated against certain diseases, and Brown didn’t want to vaccinate his son. At the time, Mississippi had two exceptions to this law: medical exemption, for kids who had a medical condition that prevented them from receiving certain shots, and a religious exemption, but only for religious groups whose doctrines explicitly prohibit vaccination, such as Christian Scientists. Brown’s son wasn’t eligible for either exemption. So Brown sued.
Brown argued that by limiting the exemption to only certain religious groups, the law violated his First Amendment rights and ought to be expanded to include any religion. (The Browns were Christian, but not a sect approved for a medical exemption.) The case made it to the state Supreme Court where it spectacularly backfired. Rather than expand the religious exemption, the justices argued that having the exemption at all was a violation of the 14th Amendment because it put the rights of certain religious parents over the rights of other parents. The state court struck down the exemption altogether.
With that decision, Mississippi became just the second state (after West Virginia) not to offer religious or personal belief exemptions to its child vaccination mandate. Mississippi now consistently has the country’s highest rates of vaccination among children entering school.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-fight-over-covid-19-vaccine-mandates-is-coming-to-kids-next/
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