Religious Objections to the Measles Vaccine? Get the Shots, Faith Leaders Say

nytimes

The measles outbreak in the United States is now the largest since the disease was declared eliminated here 19 years ago. The return of this scourge has been driven by one factor in particular: misinformation, spread by vaccine critics, that scares parents into not immunizing their children.

Along with rumors that vaccines cause autism or that the trace amounts of mercury and aluminum in them are dangerous — falsehoods that were long ago debunked — have come innuendos aimed at deeply religious parents.

Vaccines, the activists say, contain ingredients made from pigs, dogs, monkeys and aborted fetuses. Indeed, most of those assertions are based in fact. Ingredient lists published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins show that vaccines may contain these elements (although any residual DNA is present only at the parts-per-million level).

Nonetheless, vaccination is endorsed by top Jewish and Islamic scholars, and by the Vatican. Religious authorities have meticulously studied how vaccines are made and what is in them, and still have ruled that they do not violate Jewish, Islamic or Catholic law.

Although no vaccine is without side effects, immunization is one of the greatest advances in medicine. The World Health Organization estimates that vaccines have saved more than 10 million lives in just the last decade.

Trump’s Stonewall Is Beginning to Crack

theatlantic

To date, the cover-up has worked about as well as President Donald Trump could have hoped.

Almost four years after Trump declared his campaign for the presidency, and more than 30 months since he won that office, he has successfully kept secret almost all the things he wished to keep secret. How much debt does he owe, and to whom? How much of his income derives from people who do business with the U.S. government? How much of his income derives from foreign sources? Who are his business partners, and do any of them present ethical or national-security concerns?

These basics of post-Watergate official disclosure have all been suppressed.

Incredibly, even after the delivery of the Mueller report, the American people still have only the haziest idea of Trump's business connections to Russia and Russians. Do those connections cast any light on why the Russian government was so eager to elect him president in 2016? Perhaps that information is held somewhere within the Department of Justice or the FBI, but citizens and taxpayers can only guess.

Hirono accuses Barr of lying, tells him to resign

During During testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) accused Attorney General William Barr of lying to Congress and tells him he should resign

The Mueller report: A catalog of 77 Trump team lies and falsehoods

cnn

The Mueller report documents at least 77 specific instances where President Donald Trump's campaign staff, administration officials and family members, Republican backers and his associates lied or made false assertions(sometimes unintentionally) to the public, Congress, or authorities, according to a new CNN analysis. The plurality of lies came from Trump himself, and most of them took place while he was president.

The redacted version of the 448-page report released by the Justice Department earlier this month didn't find conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Special counsel Robert Mueller did not decide whether Trump obstructed justice in violation of the law, though he investigated it thoroughly and found in several instances both potentially obstructive behavior and motive.

WILLIAM BARR TORCHED BY HARVARD LAW PROFESSOR, TOP LEGAL SCHOLARS OVER 'INDEFENSIBLE' MUELLER SUMMARY: AG ‘MUST BE IMPEACHED'

newsweek

After special counsel Robert Mueller’s letter to William Barr complaining about his summary of the Russia investigation was revealed on Tuesday, top legal scholars — including a longtime Harvard law professor — condemned the Attorney General for allegedly misrepresenting the special counsel’s findings, with some calling on him to resign or be impeached.

The New York Times and the Washington Post reported on the existence of the letter, sent by Mueller to Barr in late March, earlier today, where the special counsel told the Attorney General: “The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions.”

“There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation,” Mueller added in his letter sent days after Barr released his four-page summary of the special counsel’s findings, according to the Post. “This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, a constitutional legal expert who has taught at the leading academic institution for almost half a century, condemned Barr for misleading public opinion in a statement posted to Twitter, and called for the attorney general to be impeached for his actions. “Mueller says AG Barr misrepresented the ‘context, nature & substance’ of his probe. What else is there? Barr is a total disgrace and a phony,” Tribe wrote. “He must now testify under Rep. Jerry Nadler’s rules, then resign.”

“Mueller must now testify as well. This is a new ballgame,” the professor continued. “AG Barr flat-out lied to the American people about the Mueller report’s incrimination of President Trump. He’s been outed as a total fraud. We can’t let Barr — or Trump — get away with such gross abuse of power.”

“Barr must be impeached if he doesn’t resign first,” Tribe added.

Trump takes credit for the good economy. Here's what economists say

Mattis ignored orders from Trump, White House on North Korea, Iran: report

thehill

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis declined to carry out orders from President Trump or otherwise limited his options in various attempts to prevent tensions with North Korea, Iran and Syria from escalating, The New Yorker reported Monday, the latest account of Trump’s own officials trying to check his worst instincts.

"The president thinks out loud. Do you treat it like an order? Or do you treat it as part of a longer conversation? We treated it as part of a longer conversation," a former senior national security official told The New Yorker.

"We prevented a lot of bad things from happening."

In 2017, following a series of North Korean ballistic missile tests, Trump ordered the Pentagon to begin removing the spouses and children of military personnel from South Korea, where the U.S. military has a base. An administration official told the magazine that "Mattis just ignored" the order.

In another instance in the fall of 2017, as White House officials were planning a private meeting at Camp David to develop military options for a possible conflict with North Korea, Mattis allegedly stopped the gathering from happening. He ignored a request from then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster to send officers and planners, according to a former senior administration official.

In first, Israel jails divorce-refuser on criminal charges

.timesofisrael

For the first time in its history, Israel will jail a divorce-refuser on criminal charges, at the prodding of the state-run rabbinical courts, and against the wishes of his former wife, who secured a private religious annulment of their marriage nearly a year ago.

The Jerusalem Magistrates’ Court ruled Tuesday that Meir Gorodetsky will be incarcerated for 15 months on charges of violating a court order, over his refusal — spanning over two decades — to abide by state rabbinical court orders to grant his wife a divorce. He was convicted on the charge earlier this month.

Little Evidence to Suggest Orthodox Jewish Community Affected by Measles Is Undervaccinated

.the epochtimes

Orthodox Jews have customs and beliefs very different from those of the mainstream, so when measles started to spread among them, the rest of the world jumped to the conclusion that this was because many of them eschew vaccination.

Stoked by fear of a disease that health officials could not stop, many media reports and even the New York mayor’s office have reinforced this narrative.

To date, city officials have reported 390 cases of measles in Brooklyn and Queens since the outbreak started in October, and media and government officials have implied that low vaccination rates are responsible.

To fix this apparent failure to vaccinate, Mayor Bill de Blasio mandated MMR vaccination in neighborhoods affected by the outbreak as well as in surrounding neighborhoods encompassed by four zip codes. This mandate overruled established New York law that gives parents the right to opt not to vaccinate their children based on religious reasons.

Furthermore, because of the belief that there is widespread abuse of the religious exemption among Jews, some New York state senators now are calling for an end to the exemption.

Why ‘The Brady Bunch’ Measles Episode Is Getting Grief

A record-breaking measles outbreak owes its existence to the anti-vaccination movement

salon

The report states that more than 500 of the people infected in 22 states were not vaccinated. Sixty-six people have been hospitalized. The biggest outbreaks have occurred in two communities in New York: Rockland County and Brooklyn, New York. Both have strong Orthodox Jewish communities, where misinformation about vaccinations has been spreading. Other cases that have been reported to the CDC have occurred in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Texas, Tennessee, and Washington.