Should Massachusetts Abolish Religious Exemptions for School Vaccinations?
Massachusetts Rep. Andy Vargas (CAS’15) (D-3rd Essex) says many people seeking religious exemptions from mandatory school shots do so for merely personal objections to vaccination. Photo by Mike Spencer
Should Massachusetts Abolish Religious Exemptions for School Vaccinations?
Yes, says state rep and alum Andy Vargas, because the exemption’s being abused
Anti-vaxxers first blipped Andy Vargas’ radar the year before COVID-19 reached US shores. A national measles outbreak in 2019, spread by unvaccinated Americans, spurred the Massachusetts state representative (D-3rd Essex) to propose abolishing the state’s religious exemption for school vaccinations.
The commonwealth requires students—K-12 and college, public and private—to be vaccinated against chicken pox, hepatitis B, polio, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, measles, mumps, rubella, and meningitis. Most people seeking the exemption do so for personal, not religious, beefs with vaccines, which is illegal, Vargas says. But no major religion opposes vaccination, and now some schools’ vaccination rates fall short of what’s needed to shield against contagious diseases.
Vargas (CAS’15) didn’t succeed in 2019, but four years and one pandemic later, the Democrat from Haverhill is going after religious opt-outs again.
His renewed effort comes, he says, after many religious exemption seekers have copped to using religion as a fig leaf.
“Many people have testified, stating that they use religious exemptions because of personal beliefs about vaccine safety,” he says. “This is a violation of the law—we do not allow personal belief exemptions in Massachusetts. Many of the concerns we’ve heard are based on misinformation.”
Vargas’ bill would retain medical exemptions for students who cannot be vaccinated because of factors such as allergies or compromised immune systems. Anti-vaccine parents without medical exemptions could either agree to vaccinate or else choose “nontraditional” education such as homeschooling, Vargas says.
The legislature’s joint public health committee issued a favorable report on his bill last year, Vargas says, adding that future legislative action remains unscheduled. Should lawmakers and Governor Maura Healy ultimately approve the idea—some conservative groups are opposed—Massachusetts would become just the seventh state to disallow religious exemptions to vaccines.
“As a public health matter, allowing religious exemptions for mandatory vaccinations is problematic—it makes all the kids and teachers vulnerable,” says Michael Stein, a professor and chair of health law, policy, and management at the BU School of Public Health.
“As a First Amendment religious liberties issue, too, it seems wrong,” Stein says. “One of the legal standards for exemption is that religion not be singled out, when the law is a general one and [is] not a burden that goes to the heart of religion, as is the case here with vaccinations.”
Religious acceptance of vaccines is so widespread that even Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, which promotes praying rather than medicine to fight illness, said that “rather than quarrel over vaccination, I recommend, if the law demand, that an individual submit to this process, that he obey the law, and then appeal to the gospel to save him from bad physical results.”
But Vargas’ legislation is opposed by, among others, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington, D.C.–based think tank, and the Massachusetts Family Institute, both of which say the bill would strip medical decision-making from parents.
“In a state where life is not protected before 24 weeks and schools are promoting transgender ideology to children,” Heritage’s news website reported, “Massachusetts lawmakers are now considering transferring vaccination power from parents to the government.”
“This exemption has been part of the [Massachusetts] vaccine statute for decades,” the Family Institute argues. “Parents should not have to choose between honoring their sincerely held religious beliefs and access to in-school education for their children.”
Besides disputing the “sincerely held” religiosity of objectors, Vargas makes a broader case against the exemption: “Choosing not to vaccinate your children puts them in danger of contracting vaccine-preventable illnesses. It puts immunocompromised kids in greater danger, because they’re at greater risk of exposure to illnesses that they cannot fight off and cannot be vaccinated for.”
The right to freely practice religion stops when you are putting other people in danger.
Even if some objectors were acting on real religious beliefs, he says, “the right to freely practice religion stops when you are putting other people in danger.”
He’s haunted by the country’s pre-COVID experience: “A measles outbreak in Ohio infected 85 children and put 36 of them in the hospital; all of them were unvaccinated.… A measles outbreak in New York in 2019 infected 649 people and cost taxpayers $8.4 million. A 2019 measles outbreak in Washington state cost $3.4 million, including direct medical costs, public health response costs, and productivity losses—all for 72 cases of a vaccine-preventable disease. With one exception, every county in Massachusetts has at least one school where herd immunity for measles has not been met.
“As an elected official, my priority is the health and safety of Massachusetts residents,” Vargas says. “Parents who have sincere religious reasons for not vaccinating can choose nontraditional schooling for their children.”
The US Supreme Court ruled in 1905—in a case out of Massachusetts—that states had the right to mandate vaccinations. But disallowing religious exemptions, were it to be challenged, likely would be vulnerable before today’s high court, says Linda McClain, BU School of Law’s Robert Kent Professor of Law.
“I think calling religion a fig leaf [for those with personal anti-vaccine views] is likely to be a red flag for the current SCOTUS,” McClain says. She points to the court’s 2018 ruling that allowed a Colorado baker to refuse service to a same-sex wedding couple, reversing a state finding that the baker had illegally discriminated against the couple. “Justice Kennedy concluded there was ‘hostility’ toward [baker] Jack Phillips’ religious beliefs because of a remark a commissioner made about it being ‘despicable’ to appeal to religion to justify forms of inequality,” McClain says.
“In the context of state regulations concerning COVID-19,” she adds, “the current court has taken the position that if a law allows any exceptions or exemptions at all from a general law, then it cannot treat religion less favorably. So, for example, if a vaccination law allowed any health exemptions, the court would likely say it must also allow exemptions for religious reasons.”
That would be a turnabout from the high court’s 1905 decision, which followed a smallpox outbreak. In that case, a man challenged a Massachusetts law authorizing municipalities to mandate vaccination if they deemed it necessary for public health. The man “argued that the law invaded his ‘liberty,’” McClain says. “But the court concluded that a community ‘has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members.’”
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