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🌞 Sunny and pleasant, with a high near 65. Sunset is at 5:52 p.m. It’s day 21 of the federal government shutdown.
All this week, we’ll be looking at vaccination rates across Massachusetts as part of our Connecting the Commonwealth series, Unraveling Immunity. And we want to hear from you: what conversations have you had about vaccines in your family or community? Reply to this email or send a note to daily@wgbh.org and we might include your thoughts in a future newsletter.
Four Things to Know
- Fifty years ago today, on Oct. 21, 1975, the Boston Red Sox played one of the greatest World Series games ever. The Sox hadn’t won a championship in more than half a century. That night, they were down three games to two against the Cincinnati Reds, desperate to tie it up and force a Game 7. In the crowd at Fenway that night was baseball writer Roger Angell, famous for capturing the game from a fan’s perspective. He immortalized the moment in The New Yorker with his essay “Agincourt and After: An epochal World Series, reviewed.” GBH’s Kirk Carapezza asked The New Yorker’s current editor, David Remnick, to read part of Angell’s essay to mark the 50th anniversary of this historic game. Read and listen to it here.
- Attorneys for a Chelsea man who was just deported say he should not have been sent back to his native Guatemala while an immigration judge was actively considering his appeal. An attorney representing 35-year-old Sergio Ayala Mejia said her client has a pending appeal to reopen his immigration case and that it is highly unusual for a deportation to proceed when a ruling on the appeal is imminent. Speaking to GBH News from Guatemala, Mejia said he was first arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on September 17th. He was driving his sister to her job at Market Basket in Revere when they were pulled over by three black SUVs.
- While travelers across the United States are experiencing delays and cancellations due to the ongoing federal government shutdown, it’s mostly business as usual at Boston’s Logan International Airport. According to data provided to GBH News by aviation analytics company Cirium, Boston’s on-time performance has remained virtually unchanged since the shutdown began on October 1. “We haven’t seen any impacts to staffing or anything else,” said Massport spokesman Benjamin Crawley. “Most delays as of late have been caused by weather or runway work.”
- Massachusetts voters agreed last fall to stop using the standardized tests known as MCAS as a high school graduation requirement. Now, the state is trying to work out what comes next. The advocacy group Citizens for Public Schools has been holding a series of forums around the state to collect input from students, parents and educators on what students should know by the time they graduate. “People prioritized life skills such as critical thinking, communication, problem-solving, along with financial, media and digital literacy,” Lisa Guisbond, the executive director of Citizens for Public Schools, said at a State House event Monday. “Civic knowledge and participation was another major priority that people spoke about.”
These Massachusetts parents sought religious exemptions to vaccines. We asked them why.
Massachusetts has some of the highest vaccination rates in the country. But the number of parents seeking religious exemptions — so their children aren’t required to be immunized before they start school — is steadily rising, reaching 1.3% in the 2024-25 school year.
GBH’s Adam Reilly spoke with some parents who sought religious exemptions and found a variety of reasons. Bridget Kearns of Wareham said she grew up Catholic and was uncomfortable with vaccines that use cell lines created from fetal cells obtained through abortions decades ago. These vaccines contain no actual fetal tissue.
“I kept praying on it and I really remember this moment when I really felt like I heard God in that moment. And what he said was that I have put my faith in man, and really where I needed to put my faith was in God,” she told Reilly. “Leaning into God on my own, I felt really that my relationship with God got so much better and so much clearer. I’m looking at good and evil and always trying to discern good from evil.”
There are also Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh families that don’t want to use vaccines with pork gelatin as an ingredient. And there are parents whose fear of vaccines and faith intertwine.
Maryellen Kottenstette’s daughter Cecilia died at age 10, and a federal vaccine injury court found that Cecilia was harmed by a vaccine she got as a baby. Kottenstette said that, while she ultimately received a medical vaccine exemption for Cecilia, she supports parents seeking religious exemptions — in part because they are easier to obtain.
People who don’t share these beliefs sometimes misunderstand why parents choose not to vaccinate their children, despite evidence showing that vaccines are generally safe and effective at preventing serious diseases.
“A lot of work in medical communication and science communication sort of relies on what scholars call the deficit model ... the idea that if people just knew more, they would agree or they would be in support of vaccines,” said Christopher Scheitle, a sociologist at West Virginia University. “Once you account for a person’s perception of God as not only able to intervene in the world but willing to intervene in the world, that explains away the difference between conservative Christians and more liberal Christians.”
You can find Adam Reilly’s full story here.
Dig deeper:
-Immigrants face unique hurdles to getting vaccinated
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