The Anti-Vaxxer movement is a growing health crisis in the United States. Their belief that vaccines are dangerous and cause autism, have led to a comeback of dangerous diseases such as measles, tuberculosis, and mumps.
Measles was thought to be eradicated in the US back in 2000 but there were over 1200 cases in 2019.
"The reason measles is coming back is that a critical number of parents have chosen not to vaccinate their children,'' said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told USA Today.
The drastic increase in measles cases reported in the U.S. over the past decade has led many states to change laws regarding vaccine exemptions for public schools.
Five states currently ban all nonmedical exemptions, 45 permit religious exemptions to school immunization laws, and 15 allow personal belief exemptions.
But as states tighten their laws by eliminating personal belief exemptions, Anti-Vaxxers are getting around the bans by claiming they have a religious objection to immunization.
RELATED: Anti-vaxxers cursed at ER staff who helped their son because he was 'isolated' to protect others
According to a study published in Pediatrics, after states legislators banned personal belief exemptions in Vermont, the number of religious-based exemptions for kindergartners multiplied seven-fold, going from 0.5% from 2011 to 2016 to 3.7% in 2018.
"Either parents in Vermont suddenly became very religious, or they started using religious exemptions as a replacement," Offit said according to WebMD.
Offit believes the Vermont example "could be seen as an argument to eliminate all nonmedical exemptions."
Ironically, Vermont has one of the lowest percentages of religiously-affiliated people in the nation.
A 2013 research article about religions and vaccinations found that outside of Christian Scientists, there are "few canonical bases for declining immunization" in the world's major religions. Instead, "religious reasons to decline immunization actually reflected concerns about vaccine safety or personal beliefs among a social network of people organized around a faith community."
RELATED: Anti-vaxxer arrested for spreading fake news during the deadly measles outbreak in Samoa
In California, after all nonmedical exemptions were banned, the number of medical exemptions increased in areas that previously had high numbers of nonmedical opt-outs.
All of this effort to get around state laws just to put one's child in danger of easily-preventable diseases is ridiculous when one simply looks at the facts.
Vaccinations do not cause autism. A study of over 650,000 children published in 2019 found there is absolutely no evidence that vaccinations cause autism.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.