In 2019, two decades after measles was declared “eliminated,” the CDC reported 22 outbreaks and 1,249 cases-the highest number since 1992. Rising opt-out rates have correlated, as you’d expect, with rising infections. In California, the rate nearly quadrupled between 19. Reiss notes that in Connecticut, for example, the rate of religious opt-outs from school vaccine requirements grew from 1.7 to 2.7 percent between 20, even though there was no corresponding change in the state’s religious composition. By the time the modern anti-vaxx moment picked up steam in the 2000s, these exemptions were sitting around like a loaded gun. Today, 48 states and the District of Columbia allow some form of exemption. In the 1960s and ’70s, as vaccine mandates for diseases like measles and polio proliferated, the church’s lobbying efforts contributed to a wave of state laws creating religious opt-outs. Although tiny-most estimates peg membership in the tens or low hundreds of thousands range-the group was politically influential in the mid-20th century, with several Christian Scientists serving in the Nixon administration. Members routinely reject medical care, even for their children. The Church of Christ, Scientist teaches that the material world, including disease, is an illusion, and so the way to overcome disease is through prayer, not medicine or vaccination. Grabenstein, a vaccinologist and practicing Catholic, surveyed a wide range of world religions and couldn’t find any that had anti-vaccine teachings.Įxcept one. In fact, religious opposition to vaccines is vanishingly rare. Scalia was right about vaccines and civic obligation, but it’s odd that he had to worry about vaccine requirements in the first place. Under examination, they turn out to be a policy in search of a rationale-ostensibly designed to protect religious faith, but instead overwhelmingly used in bad faith. What’s clear for now is that there are still millions of Americans who say they will refuse to be vaccinated and very little stopping most of them from claiming a religious exemption if they want to.Īll of which makes now a good time to reconsider the whole idea of religious exemptions from vaccine mandates. The success or failure of those lawsuits will go a long way toward determining how many people end up claiming exemptions. In Texas, employees are suing United Airlines over its policy of placing religious objectors on unpaid leave, one of many legal challenges to mandates around the country. On Facebook, people swap tips for couching vaccine hesitancy in religious terms. In Washington state, a church-affiliated group hosts “vaccine exemption workshops” for state employees, health workers, and school staff. Covid vaccine mandates are proliferating-and so, inevitably, are attempts to evade them by claiming a religious exemption.
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