Forty states saw rises in parents citing religious or other personal concerns for not vaccinating their young children.
The number of kids whose caregivers are opting them out of routine childhood vaccines has reached an all-time high, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday, potentially leaving hundreds of thousands of children unprotected against preventable diseases like measles and whooping cough.
The report did not dive into the reasons for the increase, but experts said the findings clearly reflect Americans’ growing unease about medicine in general.
“There is a rising distrust in the health care system,” said Dr. Amna Husain, a pediatrician in private practice in North Carolina, as well as a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. Vaccine exemptions “have unfortunately trended upward with it.”
The first amendment protects them here. However, it does not automatically grant them access to government services such as school and welfare. Our focus shouldn’t be so narrow that we forget to protect the people who children are incapable of being vaccinated. So denying these people access to school or government facilities is always an option we should look into.
That depends on the court, and on how broadly the relevant rule is written. It’s a hell of a claim to say that my religion must exempt me from laws that apply to others, and that’s exactly the sort of claim being advanced when we say that our religion requires us to not do [things that our religion says nothing about].
A relevant precedent, in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, reached in 1905 regarding the constitutionality of compulsory vaccination law, held that individual liberty is not absolute and that the public interest can justify narrowly subjecting it to the authority of the state. (note that this ruling was narrowly about public health authority and its enforceability, and the stakes of the dispute were that if Jacobson didn’t want to be vaccinated, he would be made to pay a fine and nowhere was child custody ever questioned)
Personally I agree there shouldn’t be religious exemptions on vaccines, that the only cases that justify non-vaccinated kids attending schools would be medical justifications, not religious ones. Allowing non-medical people to carve unscientific loopholes in best public health praxis because they feel like Jesus or Cthulu (neither of whom said to not get vaccines) wouldn’t want that basically means, if you extend that reasoning to its logical end, that when I say I have a religion and I tell you it means that law cannot apply to me or else it violates 1A, that no law can be consistently made to apply to anyone. …and when it can’t be made to apply to everyone equally, expect it to be applied, forcefully, to people of the wrong faith, or of the wrong race, or of the wrong caste.
A lot of these anti-vaxxers would be fine with not educating their kids.
OTOH, a bunch of them would just want to educate them at some sort of vaccine-free school or something, which they would presume would get government money. As long as they don’t get money…