1) I wonder how many students have died from these increased measles “outbreaks”? I’ll tell you: negligible at best. People saw measles as a kids’ disease of mostly inconvenience, like chicken pox. A number of these vaccines are purely for convenience, and some aren’t even vaccines at all, like the Vitamin K shot. We need to have the maturity in this discussion to recognize that not all diseases, and not all vaccines, are the same.

2) the irony that a Catholic school won’t accept a state’s appro…

There is a problem if we start to think that there is an acceptable amount of children's deaths.

In a discussion like this, it is often about assessing risk and weighing the consequences of different decisions, rather than making a statement on whether the death of a particular child is “acceptable.”

But those are the stakes: the death of children.

That is the virtue of looking at and evaluating the statistics and the risk factors of different decisions. Everyone has (should have) the right to do so. A family may look at the varicella vaccine and weigh the relative risk of chicken pox (risk: low mortality, relatively, but maybe not actually zero, as you point out) versus the relative risk involved in getting the vaccine and make a rational decision. Different families may reach different decisions Much in the same way as you and I weigh t…

The risk of a life threatening reaction to a vaccine is about one in a million (not an exaggeration). The risk of death from measles for a child is one in a thousand. Risk of death from varicella (chickenpox) is one in sixty thousand. I think this school should have made an exception because of the child's reaction to a vaccine. But exceptions should be rare. Vaccines do rely on herd immunity and parents that are led astray by grifters, claiming that the risk of vaccination versus the sickness itself are equal will lead to the deaths of more children.

The math may seem simple, but I think the statistics can be used in an incredibly misleading way. I was recently at the pediatrician's and in the waiting room there was a giant poster about the HPV vaccine (helpfully made by the manufacturer) and the statistics were shocking, to be sure - but they provided no context. What does 1 in so many people mean - is that worldwide, or the US? What's the male/female split? By age group? What about access to clean water, emergency medical services, adequa…