Vaccination and religion
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Vaccination_and_religion".

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (September 2008)

This article has no lead section. To comply with Wikipedia's lead section guidelines, one should be written. Please discuss this issue on the talk page and read the lead section guide to make sure the introduction summarizes the article.

Historical

This section may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (August 2008)

Catholic and Anglican missionaries vaccinated Northwest Coast Indians during a 1862 smallpox epidemic.¹

Iceland in 1816 made the clergy responsible for small pox vaccination and gave them the responsibility of keeping vaccination records for their parishes, Sweden also had similar practices.²

When vaccination was introduced into UK public policy, and adoption followed overseas, there was opposition from social cranks and trade unionists, including sectarian ministers and those interested in self help and alternative medicines like homeopathy.³

Timothy Dwight

Anti-vaccination proponents were most common in protestant countries; those that were religious often came from minority religious movements outside of mainstream protestantism, including Quakers in England and Baptists in Sweden.⁴

Several Boston clergymen and devout physicians formed the Anti-vaccination Society in 1798, only two years after Jenner's publication of smallpox vaccination. Others complained that the practice was dangerous, going so far as to demand that doctors who carried out these procedures be tried for attempted murder.⁵

Aims and results of the early movements

In Massachusetts, the argument continued from that about variolation, with a minority religious view strongly put that others should eschew immunization and accept the smallpox that God sent. Cotton Mather and other leaders favored efforts to prevent disease.

In the USA, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was the first to make vaccination mandatory, in 1908[1]. In the UK, vaccination was provided free from 1840 under the Vaccination Act. In 1873, a further Vaccination Act made vaccination compulsory. Resistance to compulsion grew, and in 1885, after riots in Leicester, a Royal Commission sat and reported 7 years later, recommending the abolition of cumulative penalties. This was accomplished in the 1898 Act, which also introduced a conscience clause, allowing parents who did not believe that vaccination was efficacious or safe to obtain exemption. This extended the concept of the "conscientious objector" in English law. The aims of the protesters and organisations had thus been achieved in 1898.

Current

Islam and Judaism, religions with dietary prohibitions which regard particular animals as unclean, make exceptions for medical treatments derived from those animals.^{6 7}

In the early 2000s Islamic religious leaders in northern Nigeria advised their followers to not have their children vaccinated with oral polio vaccine. The boycott caused cases of polio to arise not only in Nigeria but also in neighboring countries. The followers were also wary of other vaccinations, and Nigeria reported over 20,000 measles cases and nearly 600 deaths from measles from January through March 2005.⁸ In 2006 Nigeria accounted for over half of all new polio cases worldwide.⁹ Outbreaks continued thereafter; for example, at least 200 children died in a late-2007 measles outbreak in Borno State.¹⁰

The Vatican Curia has expressed concern about the rubella vaccine's embryonic cell origin, saying Catholics have "a grave responsibility to use alternative vaccines and to make a conscientious objection with regard to those which have moral problems."¹¹ The Vatican concluded that until an alternative becomes available it is acceptable for Catholics to use the existing vaccine, writing, "This is an unjust alternative choice, which must be eliminated as soon as possible."¹¹

Some conservative U.S. Christian groups oppose mandatory vaccination for diseases typically spread via sexual contact, arguing that the possibility of disease deters risky sexual contact. For example, the Family Research Council opposes mandatory use of vaccines against the human papillomavirus, writing, "Our primary concern is with the message that would be delivered to nine- to 12-year-olds with the administration of the vaccines. Care must be taken not to communicate that such an intervention makes all sex 'safe'."¹²¹³

Exemptions

In the U.S., all but two states allow parents to opt out of their children's otherwise-mandatory vaccinations for religious reasons. The number of religious exemptions rose greatly in the late 1990s and early 2000s; for example, in Massachusetts, the rate of those seeking exemptions rose from 0.24% in 1996 to 0.60% in 2006. Some parents are falsely claiming religious beliefs in order to get exemptions, and some pediatricians are advising parents to lie on their applications.¹⁴ The American Medical Association opposes such exemptions, because they endanger not only the health of the individual child, but also the health of children in the child's group and the community at large.¹⁵

References