The last time I was on a bus travelling out east, there was a Mennonite man who was talking about vaccines with the bus driver. I was surprised to overhear that he was pro vaccine, and that there isn't anything in his belief system that mandates he be anti-vaccine.
So I don't know what drives the anti-vaxx view for Mennonites, but from what this man was saying it doesn't seem to be something that is inherent to being a Mennonite (like blood transfusions for JWs).
I live in a region with a lot of Amish and Mennonite groups. As I understand it, there's no central authority, but each community can make their own rules. Also, he may have been following his own instincts, independent of his sect.
I wonder if it's simply the fact that there really isn't anything driving them to get their kids vaccinated rather than a particular religious conviction. In Ontario, the old-order Mennonite and Amish groups have separate schooling for their kids and aren't integrated into the medical system here (not even being a part of our public health insurance system). Your family doctor and public health agency (through the schools) are the avenues the vast majority have to vaccination and so being apart from that, the old-order families would need to make a special effort to get vaccinated above and beyond what most people need to do.
"Previously, Moore shared that this outbreak in Ontario was traced back to a Mennonite wedding in New Brunswick, and is spreading primarily in Mennonite and Amish communities where vaccination rates lag. The vast majority of those cases are in southwestern Ontario."
"Most cases this year are in regions where local vaccination rates are as low as 30 percent.
Those towns are home to a culturally conservative Mennonite group with ties to Mexico that has historically been less likely to accept vaccines. The group primarily speaks Plautdietsch, a Low German dialect spoken almost entirely by Mennonites."
Most of the cases in Texas are in school-age children between ages 5 and 17 who are either unvaccinated or have unknown vaccination status, and a few are among children who received a single dose of the MMR vaccine.
What is known about this outbreak and the community where it’s occurring?
This outbreak started in a Mennonite community in West Texas where there are low vaccination rates. Many of the children are homeschooled or attend smaller private schools, and many are unvaccinated.
This is not atypical for the larger outbreaks that we’ve seen in the United States in the recent past. In 2019, the U.S. saw 1,274 measles cases, including a large outbreak of slightly more than 900 cases in an Orthodox Jewish community in New York. In 2014, there was a measles outbreak of 383 cases in an Amish community in Ohio.
For some reason many of the mainstream media reports won't reference that the Canadian outbreaks are occurring in mainly Mennonite communities. Perhaps they're trying to avoid singling them out.
Dense groups of unvaccinated people are just waiting for a biological match to be lit...
I think it's more likely they want to leave the impression that this is all caused by "far right" anti-vaxxers and not a religious group with roots that go back hundreds of years.
