There are schools in this country in which over 40% of students have religious exemptions allowing them to be unvaccinated. But, other than Christian Scientists, do any faiths actually provide a basis for refusing vaccinations?
I don't see any. I think that religion is being used as a fig leaf to disguise discredited anti-vaccination fears.


Refuse to Vaccinate? Little Religious Ground to Stand On

Earlier this month, a bill surfaced in the New York State Legislature proposing that parents be permitted to reject vaccinations for their children simply because they opposed them philosophically, as one might oppose Oreos or the Disney Channel. The bill had emerged before and gone nowhere; in the unlikely event that it was enacted, it would give parents even greater leeway to reject science for children who were ostensibly in school to gain an understanding of it.

On this occasion, the timing was especially bizarre, given the recent measles outbreak tied to Disneyland and the renewed fury it has brought to vaccine resistance. It was as if a plane had again crash-landed in the Hudson River and lawmakers seized the moment to spare airlines the expense of inflatable rafts.

This week in Albany, the bill’s Senate sponsor, Martin Dilan, who represents parts of Brooklyn including Williamsburg, must have awakened to its lunacy; he retracted his endorsement, leaving his fellow Democrat and the proposal’s chief advocate, Assemblyman Thomas J. Abinanti of Westchester County, on his own and in need of a new partner. Across the country, state legislatures — California’s, Vermont’s and Maine’s are among them — have been talking about strengthening their vaccine requirements, not diluting them, subtracting personal-belief exemptions, not facilitating them.

New York already allows parents to seek vaccine exemptions for medical or religious reasons. In effect, philosophical exemptions are superfluous because religious exemptions perform the same function. A state form requires that parents provide a written passage, in their own words, explaining why they are requesting the exemption, and the principles that guide the objection. A head of school can accept the submission or reject it, ask for supporting documents — a letter from a priest or a rabbi, for instance — or not. Anyone whose request is denied can appeal to the education commissioner.

That religious exemptions are available at all to any but Christian Scientists, whose disavowal of medicine is foundational, remains a subject debated not nearly enough. It is not just that the waivers are used to conceal the discredited anti-vaccination sentiments shared by parents with no theological commitments whatsoever. (As one Manhattan school nurse put it to me, “It would be practically impossible, not to mention a huge pain, to prove that they are lying.” Of the 25 percent of students at the School for Young Performers in TriBeCa who received religious exemptions last year, how many have parents prepping them for the seminary?) It is that among the major religions there is virtually no canonical basis for vaccine aversion; the Bible, the Quran and the texts of Sanskrit were all obviously written before the creation of vaccines, and most religions privilege the preservation of life.

Still, at the Church of God Christian Academy in Far Rockaway, Queens, during the 2013-14 school year, according to New York State data, 42 percent of students had religious exemptions and fewer than 57 percent of children were completely immunized. Calls to the school seeking explanation were not returned. Some evangelical Christians are also devotees of attachment parenting, which carries with it a strain of vaccine skepticism. When measles erupted around a megachurch in Texas two years ago, the church’s pastor didn’t invoke liturgical justifications for why her congregants didn’t immunize their children, but instead the entirely debunked connection between autism and vaccines.

Outbreaks of measles and mumps in ultra-Orthodox communities in and around Brooklyn in recent years have provoked avid discussion among rabbis about vaccine bias and possible underpinnings for it in interpretations of Jewish law. Although the vaccination rate among Orthodox Jews over all is high, resistance has taken hold in certain quarters. At the Yeshiva Beis Chaya Mushka in Crown Heights, for instance, the proportion of students receiving vaccine exemptions more than doubled to 12 percent during the 2013-14 school year.

“I don’t think there’s much rabbinical support for not vaccinating,” Don Seeman, a rabbi and professor of Jewish studies and medical anthropology at Emory University, told me. “What does exist in certain communities is a lot of anxiety about science and the risks we are exposed to through technology.”

This week, in fact, the Orthodox Union, along with the Rabbinical Council of America, issued a statement that said that there are “halachic obligations to care for one’s health as well as to take measures to prevent harm and illness to others, and Jewish law defers to medical experts in determining and prescribing appropriate medical responses to illness and prevention.” The group concluded that the vaccination of children is “the only responsible course of action.”

Beyond these arguments is our refusal to allow people to elect out of other crucial aspects of public health law on the basis of religion. You cannot object to a drunken-driving arrest, for instance, on the grounds that you worship Bacchus and feel encouraged to have six shots of bourbon before getting in a Chevy. You cannot refuse to wear seatbelts because your spiritual beliefs reject confinement.

In a well-argued essay, “Vaccination in Halakhah and in Practice in the Orthodox Community,” published in Hakirah, The Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought, Asher Bush, a rabbi, made the implicit point that on the subject of vaccines we are in some sense regressing. He pointed to the case of an Orthodox Jew who was arrested in 1896 in London for refusing to vaccinate his child on the grounds that his religion forbade him. The prosecutor in the case, who was also Jewish, sought guidance from the chief rabbi of Britain. The rabbi’s conclusion, essentially, was that the man’s contention was hogwash.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/nyregion/refuse-to-vaccinate-little-religious-ground-to-stand-on.html?hpw&rref=nyregion&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

Last edited by Goose (2/15/2015 7:50 am)