We just had the first measles death in the U.S. in a dozen years:
Well, anti-vaxxers Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey should really feel like sh%$ right now.
For 12 years, not a single American has died because of the measles virus. But because of the anti-vaxxer movement, death by measles is once again a stark reality in the United States.
On Thursday, the Washington State Department of Health confirmed that a woman succumbed to the disease after discovering the cause of death via an autopsy.
In a statement released by the agency, the woman apparently contracted the disease unknowingly while at a hospital during a measles outbreak in the spring. And she was even more vulnerable to the disease because the medication she had been taking weakened her immune system.
………
The woman who died caught a disease that should have remained wiped out within our shores and it would have remained that way had it not been for anti-vaccination nut jobs who refuse to vaccinate their kids out of some ridiculous notion that the MMR vaccine causes autism. This death was preventable and shows why it is time to require vaccinations by law and eliminate the exemptions that allowed the measles to have a comeback in the first place.
It gets even worse, because this woman had been vaccinated for the disease:
A woman who became the first person to die of the measles in the U.S. in 12 years had been vaccinated against the disease, it has been revealed.
Health officials said she had the injection as a child but succumbed because she had a compromised immune system.
Dr. Jeanette Stehr-Green, the Clallam County health officer, told KOMO-TV the woman had been vaccinated as a child, but because she had other health problems and was taking medications that interfered with her response to an infection ‘she was not protected.’
The anti-vaxxers are morally responsible for the death of this woman.
Their actions are unsupported by the facts, selfish, and evil, and I am pleased as punch that California has tightened up its vaccination criteria.