- NY Times article
As of this writing, the measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico has spread to 99 people; 95 percent of those diagnosed with measles this year are unvaccinated or have an unknown vaccine status, and the vast majority of those affected are under 19. The outbreak is concentrated in Gaines County, Texas, a rural area in West Texas with a disproportionately high level of religious or philosophical exemptions to vaccines — a whopping 47.95 percent of students from one of only three public school districts in the county claimed exemptions in the 2023-24 school year. The percentage of exemptions in all of Gaines County is nearly 14 percent, and that doesn’t include home-schooled children.
Earlier this month, the Texas Department of State Health Services spokesperson Lara Anton said that the outbreak in Gaines County was mostly among the “close-knit, undervaccinated” Mennonite community, whose members don’t get regular health care and don’t attend public school. “The church isn’t the reason that they’re not vaccinated,” Anton said in a news release. “It’s all personal choice and you can do whatever you want.”
“Do whatever you want” might be good advice for choosing a fun new wallpaper, but it’s terrible advice for encouraging vaccine uptake.
You might assume that many religious groups are doctrinally opposed to vaccination. Why else would the majority of states allow for religious or philosophical exemptions to school vaccine mandates? But that is not accurate. The Mennonite leadership, as Anton points out, is not against vaccines — and neither are most other major religious groups. The U.S. Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches made a statement in 2021 regarding the Covid vaccine that “our confession of faith and our current and historical practice do not provide the necessary rationale for granting a religious exemption based on the theological convictions of the denomination” (italics theirs).
This isn’t the first time that undervaccinated religious groups have been at the epicenter of measles outbreaks. In 1991, a Philadelphia measles outbreak that killed nine people spread in two church communities that did not believe in any medical intervention. In 2018-19, an outbreak in Brooklyn took root among undervaccinated Orthodox Jews.
As Caitlin Rivers points out in a recent guest essay for Times Opinion, routine childhood vaccines are still very, very popular in the United States. But Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, is already going back on promises he made about vaccines during his confirmation hearing. Earlier he said he wouldn’t mess with the childhood vaccination schedule, and now he’s saying “Nothing is going to be off limits.”
The pro-vaccine majority in this country needs to go on the offensive now. Otherwise outbreaks like the one currently raging in Texas will become more commonplace, and young children will die.
“I’m incredibly concerned and expect routine vaccination rates to continue to decline,” said Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist who writes the popular newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist. She thinks that vaccine advocates need to “anticipate next moves so we are proactively driving narrative instead of always being in defense.”
Here is where faith leaders — particularly conservatives and those aligned with President Trump — come in. They should be among those getting out in front of recent anti-vaccine “religious freedom” messaging, as Republican parents are far more distrustful of vaccines and public health officials than Democratic parents are. Kennedy has a lot of fans among the “crunchy” Christians of America.
Religious leaders who stepped up to defend vaccines during the pandemic know how to convince their increasingly skeptical congregations that vaccines save lives. Most Americans who go to religious services said they would trust their clergy’s advice on the Covid vaccine, according to 2021 polling from Pew Research.
To get ahead of whatever Kennedy might do in the future, religious leaders can work with local public health officials to set up vaccine clinics in their houses of worship, and they can go on social media and say that “Jesus Christ would advocate for people using vaccines,” as the prominent evangelical Franklin Graham did in 2021 in regards to the Covid-19 vaccine. When there was a measles outbreak among the majority-Muslim Somali community in Minneapolis in 2017, public health leaders worked with imams to help convince their parishioners to vaccinate their children.
The Catholic Church has been a leader in vaccine advocacy. The Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops, for example, says the schools that it runs do not accept students who have a religious or philosophical vaccine exemption, because it believes vaccines are in line with Catholic teachings.
What the Catholic Church is doing right now in West Virginia is instructive for other faith leaders because it’s arguing that religious freedom can also be interpreted as the freedom to require vaccines to attend its schools.
For decades West Virginia had a no-religious-exemption policy in its public schools, and as a result, the measles, mumps and rubella “vaccine coverage rate for the 2023-2024 school year was 98.3 percent,” above the 95 percent herd immunity threshold, according to The Intelligencer of Wheeling, W.Va. But a law that just passed the West Virginia State Senate would allow for religious or philosophical exemptions — and it would also “prohibit parochial and religious schools from setting their own immunization requirements.”
Mark Brennan, bishop of the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston, told West Virginia MetroNews last year that whatever changes are made to state law, Catholic schools would continue to require vaccinations because “it really is for the good of the children and the staffs, but also the Catholic way is to contribute to the common good. Vaccinations have a more than two centuries track record of really helping to improve public health,” Brennan said.
This year, the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston shows no evidence of backing down, and if the state law passes, they could sue on grounds of religious freedom to require vaccines. “We have always maintained our constitutional right to order our schools as we see fit in accord with our beliefs,” Tim Bishop, the director of marketing and communications for the diocese, told The Intelligencer’s Emma Delk on Feb. 21.
Opposition to the West Virginia law is bipartisan and includes a petition signed by more than 6,500 parents. Pro-vaccine efforts need to include people of all different political and religious backgrounds if they are going to be effective. It would be too easy to dismiss organizing that only included liberals, for instance, as biased or especially obedient to science. And the church plays a particularly promising role because of the authority it still commands. Grassroots secular nonprofit groups like the SAFE Communities Coalition are doing good work to organize the pro-vaccine majority.
Pro-vaccine Americans need to continue to stay vigilant, use every tool available to them and keep a close eye on Kennedy and the actions of the organizations he runs. The Trump administration has already taken down a C.D.C. flu vaccine campaign in the middle of a particularly nasty flu season. There’s no telling what it might do going forward, and we shouldn’t wait around, white-knuckled, to find out.
No comments:
Post a Comment