Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will see morning showers, with partly sunny skies later in the day, and a high of 71. Sunrise is 5:17 and sunset is 8:29, for 15 hours, 12 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 63.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1876, an express train called the Transcontinental Express arrives in San Francisco via the first transcontinental railroad only 83 hours and 39 minutes after leaving New York City.
One reads, with disappointment, how Wisconsin, once a leader in childhood vaccinations, [is] now a leader in vaccine skepticism:
The percentage of Wisconsin schoolchildren not receiving state-mandated vaccinations because of their parents’ personal beliefs is four times higher than it was a generation ago.
That rise in personal conviction waivers has driven a decrease in all immunizations among Wisconsin children ahead of new measles outbreaks hitting the U.S. that are linked to three deaths.
Wisconsin’s measles vaccination rate among kindergartners was the third-lowest in the nation in the 2023-24 school year, behind Idaho and Alaska. (Montana didn’t report data.)
….
Wisconsin had been a national leader in childhood immunizations.
But increasingly, Wisconsin parents are opting out:
- For all childhood immunizations, vaccination rates statewide were lower in almost every quarter from 2020 through 2024, in comparison with the average rate in the three years before COVID-19.
- Wisconsin was one of the states with the largest drops in the measles vaccination rate for kindergartners between the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years, and no county had an MMR vaccination rate above 85%, The Economist reported.
- By a different measure, the measles vaccination rate for 2-year-olds in 2024 was as low as 44% in Vernon County and under 70% in 14 other counties.
See Tom Kertscher, Wisconsin, once a leader in childhood vaccinations, now a leader in vaccine skepticism, Wisconsin Watch, June 2, 2025.
There is a strong libertarian case for mandatory vaccinations. It’s a case that I support. See Jason Brennan, A Libertarian Case for Mandatory Vaccination, 44 J. Med. Ethics 37 (2018), https://www.jstor.org/stable/26879650. (Brennan argues that “people who refuse vaccinations violate the ‘clean hands principle’, a (in this case, enforceable) moral principle that prohibits people from participating in the collective imposition of unjust harm or risk of harm. In a libertarian framework, individuals may be forced to accept certain vaccines not because they have an enforceable duty to serve the common, and not because cost–benefit analysis recommends it, but because anti-vaxxers are wrongfully imposing undue harm upon others.”)
See also For Your Consideration, Dr. Jonas Salk for a model of demeanor and an example of an American life well lived.
What’s Up: June 2025 Skywatching Tips from NASA: