Even after contracting chickenpox, a highly-contagious disease, teen says ban “doesn’t seem logical.”
An 18-year old Kentucky Catholic school student sued his local health department for religious discrimination over its ban on unvaccinated students. Jerome Kunkel, a student at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Assumption Academy, said he has deeply-held beliefs against being inoculated with the chickenpox vaccine.
He sued, subsequently contracted chicken pox, then lost his case. He just lost again.
Kunkel filed his suit in March, lost in April, contracted chickenpox in May, and on Monday lost his appeal.
“The commonwealth has a compelling interest in taking limited and temporary steps to control an outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease,” a three-judge panel on a Kentucky court of appeals ruled, denying Kunkel’s request for an injunction, the Lexington Herald-Leader reports.
By mid-March “there were at least 32 students or 13 percent of the student body with chickenpox at the two schools, according to the health department.”
Once the ban was implemented only two new cases cropped up.
The Friendly Atheist adds that Kunkel “mistakenly believes that the chickenpox vaccine contains the tissue of aborted fetuses, something he says would violate his strict Catholic faith. His delusion would violate his other delusion. (Indeed, even the National Catholic Bioethics Center says the vaccine doesn’t contain aborted cells and is therefore okay for believers to use.)”
After losing his case the first time in April, Kunkel said he was “devastated.”
“It doesn’t seem logical to me,” he added.