Vaccine Policy Based on Science, Not Fearmongering

Vaccination policy lies at the intersection of two of CFI’s primary objectives: protecting science-based policy and ending religious privilege.

Vaccines are one of the lowest-risk, highest-reward medical interventions in human history. When a large majority of the population becomes vaccinated against a certain disease, countless lives are spared from illness and death as the germ responsible for the disease can no longer find enough suitable hosts to continue its spread throughout the population. We call this “herd immunity.” 

For measles, an extremely contagious virus, the herd immunity threshold is no less than 95 percent of a given population. For Polio, a disease that is less contagious (albeit just as harmful to infected persons) than measles, the herd immunity threshold is 80 percent. Prior to the widespread administration of the measles vaccine, an estimated 2.6 million people, most of them children, died each year globally from measles complications. The advent of a safe, effective vaccine caused the rate of death to plummet. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the measles vaccine prevented 21.1 million deaths in the period from 2000 to 2017.

Unfortunately, the lifesaving potential of vaccines is often obscured by a coordinated, aggressive disinformation campaign meant to sow fear and mistrust in vaccine science. Vaccine deniers have been known to engage in highly unscrupulous tactics. Their cause is nothing less than the erosion of one of the most successful public health advancements in human history.

These efforts accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, state legislatures were flooded with legislation to undermine the government’s ability to require lifesaving measures that include the administration of vaccines against the novel coronavirus. Many of these bills have followed certain trends:

• Legislation to prohibit the government from using emergency powers to require vaccination against the novel coronavirus, even for health care workers who come in direct contact with medically vulnerable individuals.
• Legislation to prevent public and private institutions, such as schools and businesses, from requiring medically eligible persons to vaccinate as a condition of entry to settings and activities that involve close proximity to many persons outside of one’s household.

In order to advance science-based policy on vaccination, it is essential to defeat such bills as well as related executive orders from state governors’ offices. CFI has prioritized this type of advocacy and will continue to do so.

The connection between vaccines and science-based policy is pretty obvious. But if you’re wondering how vaccines relate to ending religious privilege, here’s the answer: nearly every state has laws that provide a religious exemption to the requirement for children to be vaccinated to attend school and daycare. In many states, it is easier for parents to obtain a religious exemption than it is to get their children vaccinated. 

In addition to exemptions for explicitly religious concerns, many states allow an exemption for vague “personal,” “moral,” or “philosophical” concerns. These exemptions perform a nearly identical function to religious exemptions, but they apply to a broader scope of the population. CFI opposes all nonmedical vaccine exemptions.

There is overlap between the vaccine denier movement and support for religious vaccine exemptions. Many vaccine deniers know that religious exemptions are the simplest method to evade their societal obligation to vaccinate. It is likely that a substantial proportion of religious exemptions are sought by vaccine deniers whose actual motivation is rooted in anti-vaccine disinformation rather than genuine religious concerns. 

For example, when Maine considered legislation to repeal the state’s religious exemption in 2019, large numbers of residents testified against the legislation on grounds related to supposed health and safety risks associated with vaccination. Many of these witnesses did not even mention religion in their testimony. As CFI’s Communications Director Paul Fidalgo testified, there are websites devoted to coaching vaccine deniers on how to exploit Maine’s religious exemption to evade vaccination requirements.

Furthermore, when California repealed its religious exemption in 2015, medical exemptions tripled in the following years. This suggests that many of the former religious exemptions were held by vaccine deniers who turned to exploitation of the medical exemption once the religious exemption was no longer available.

Write your lawmakers about anti-vaccination legislation, and urge them to reject such bills and instead pursue evidence-based policy. Make clear to lawmakers that they should be enacting bills that require vaccinations in schools and other public settings.