Anti-vaccine megachurch hit with measles epidemic, now offering free
vaccinations


An outbreak of the measles at Kenneth Copeland's Texas megachurch has
gotten some attention because (1) measles is something children are
generally vaccinated for, these days and (2) Kenneth Copeland is, of
course, an anti-vaccine crackpot. In what seems to be yet another
bitterly ironic attempt by God to teach noisy religious fundamentalists
what-for, the church has thus become the epicenter of a small but
worrisome outbreak that has so far infected ten and resulted in the
Department of State Health Services issuing an alert spanning North Texas.

That has megachurch pastors doing a bit of fancy dancin', with Pastor
Terri Pearson (Copeland's daughter) walking back their leader's
anti-vaccination stance to explain to the congregation that no, God does
not really want your children to contract a potentially dangerous
disease that vaccinations have all but licked because duh.

"There are a lot of people that think the Bible -- we talk about
walking by faith -- it leaves out things such as, I don't know, people
just get strange. But when you read the Old Testament, you find that it
is full of precautionary measures, and it is full of the law.

Why did the Jewish people, why did they not die out during the
plague? Because the Bible told them how to be clean, told them how to
disinfect, told them there was something contagious. And the interesting
thing of it, it wasn't a medical doctor per se who took care of those
things, it was the priesthood…."

See there? Even back in the before-times, people were smart enough to
know that if you could do a very simple thing in order to Not Die, you
probably ought to do that thing and not just trust that all of God's
various plagues and viruses had built-in piety detectors that would run
away when they got a taste of the likes of religious you.

Helpfully, the church now states that it was an unclean outsider that
brought this evil into their midst, which is a bit of a cop-out:

Eagle Mountain International Church, about 50 miles northwest of
Dallas, released a statement Tuesday that said a visitor attended a
service who had been overseas and was exposed to measles.

“Therefore the congregation, staff at Kenneth Copeland Ministries
and the daycare center on the property were exposed through that
contact,” the statement said.

Which is, of course, how epidemics work. Somebody goes somewhere and
brings back a something that none of the other somebodies have an
immunity to, infecting them all and allowing the something to spread
ever-further. By vaccinating yourself and your children, you are not
only making sure your family does not get the disease in question, you
are also making sure that your family is not a disease-riddled pus
vector oozing easily preventable plague onto all the other people in
your community, causing you to be scorned as an "outsider" and the state
department of health to issue up bulletins specifically naming you and
your community as the disease-riddled pus vectors in question and
warning your fellow human beings to wash their hands a lot if they have
to come in contact with you.

And that, children, is why the church run by an anti-vaccination crank
is now holding free vaccination clinics in apparent contradiction to the
beliefs of said crank. Curiously, there doesn't seem to be any word from
Copeland himself; barring other evidence we can only assume that the
rest of the church leadership locked him in a nice, sturdy cupboard for
a while?

http://tinyurl.com/mcs9ybl

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Well, I hope everyone who contracted the measles gets over it
successfully, and maybe some of the churchgoers will get over their
religious crackpot-itis.