The rise of religious exemptions from vaccines

In January, a measles outbreak at Disneyland caught the media’s attention. Over 114 cases appeared not only in California, but in six other U.S. states and parts of Mexico. Even though measles was officially eliminated from the United States in 2000, there have been more and more cases of the disease in the last seven years, with over 600 in 2014 alone. That year, one outbreak in an Amish community in Ohio included 383 diagnoses of measles. This particular religious community reconsidered its previous relaxed stance on vaccines. The Amish weren’t opposed to vaccination, but rather didn’t realize that measles was still such a threat to public health. 

Despite the outbreak in Ohio, in general the rise in measles has not necessarily been tied to religious movements, but rather to increasing numbers of religious and personal exemptions from vaccines. Only West Virginia and Mississippi refuse to grant vaccine exemptions for religious reasons. The burgeoning anti-vaccine movement is a constellation of parents who exempt their children from vaccines for a variety of reasons: fears about the links between vaccination and autism (based often on a British study that has since been proven false), concerns over toxins, theories about government conspiracy, and claims about individual autonomy versus governmental control. Religious exemption is defined differently in each state, but it often just requires parents to claim that religion is the reason their child won’t be vaccinated. This type of exemption has come under fire in recent weeks because of concerns that parents are avoiding vaccination by using religion as an excuse. 

What is striking to me as a historian of religion is how these outbreaks in recent years prove to be different than previous outbreaks of measles in the 1980s and 1990s that were primarily associated with religious communities, particularly Christian Science.