By Aaron Miiler-
A stubborn teenager from Kentucky who unsuccessfully sued Kentucky’s Health department after being banned from school for refusing to get the chickenpox vaccine has contracted the disease.
Jerome Kunkel, a student at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Assumption Academy in Walton, Kentucky, was banned from attending school or participating on the school’s basketball team, after refusing the vaccination. He refused to get vaccinated against chickenpox for religious reasons.
Kunkel sued the Northern Kentucky Independent District Board of Health in March after it barred students without current vaccinations from attending school and after-school activities during a chickenpox outbreak. Kunkel and his classmates declined to receive the chickenpox vaccine because it is made in laboratory-generated cells taken from a fetus aborted in London in 1966.
Following a rise in the number of chickenpox cases at the schools, the health department restricted nonvaccinated and nonimmune students in order to contain the spread. After an initial prohibition of participation in extracurricular activities, the department subsequently ordered those students to stay home from school until at least 21 days after the last case.
Kunkel’s legal suit failed after a judge heard of over 30 cases of the chickenpox were confirmed among students at Kunkel’s school, the health department reported in March. The student’s legal protest was based on religious beliefs preventing him from receiving vaccines produced using cell lines derived from aborted fetuses generations ago – as is the case with the chickenpox vaccine.