Were I to argue that freedom entitles me to run red lights when I’m in a rush, even my libertarian acquaintances would suggest that I be confined. Endangering others is a sociopath’s instinct, not an inalienable right.
That principle should guide us in considering the hundreds of families who claim that mandatory vaccinations for students to enroll in Massachusetts schools trample their religious freedom. Inquiring minds ask, first, whether religious beliefs that conflict with science should trump the risk of unvaccinated kids infecting their peers. Answering that question careens into another uncomfortable fact for anti-vaxxers and the vaccine-hesitant: No major religion opposes vaccination. Even the founder of medicine-dubious Christian Science counseled compliance with mandated shots.
Massachusetts should join the enlightened five states that forbid families from running red lights, medically speaking. Democratic state Representative Andy Vargas has indicated he may file legislation next year, as he first did in 2019, to abolish the Bay State’s religious exemption.
Exemption-seekers at past hearings were pressed: Exactly which house of worship do you attend? Many acknowledged that their religious arguments camouflaged “personal beliefs about vaccine safety,” Vargas told me last year. “This is a violation of the law — we do not allow personal belief exemptions in Massachusetts.”
Only 15 states do allow them, perhaps in deference to citizens, religious or secular, who believe that government has no right telling them what to inject into their bodies. Most parents disagree, as has the law since the Theodore Roosevelt administration, when the Supreme Court upheld mandatory vaccination against smallpox.
Sadly, conspiracy thinking, gassed by social media, has fueled the anti-vax fringe. Last school year, Massachusetts granted 813 kindergarteners no-needle passes on religious grounds, a staggering jump from 147 in 1987-88. News consumers who know that religious devotion is tanking can be forgiven for any confusion.
“Many of the concerns we’ve heard are based on misinformation,” Vargas said. Misinformation is religious poseurs’ real profession of faith, with a vast liturgy, whether it’s vaccines cause autism (debunked), enable Bill Gates to keep tabs on them (unhinged), or come from aborted fetuses. (That last one at least that has a kernel of truth. Abortions performed decades ago provided vaccine-making cells that continue growing in a lab for use today. But given vaccines’ life-saving benefits, even the anti-abortion Vatican blesses COVID-19 shots “when ethically irreproachable” vaccines can’t be had.)
Vargas began his crusade after 2019′s nationwide measles outbreak rampaged in communities with low vaccination rates. The disease spread to 31 states, according to the CDC, generating 1,274 cases. Vargas filed his bill after immunocompromised constituents in Massachusetts conveyed their legitimate fears of unvaccinated people. The foregoing experiences notwithstanding, the legislation has inspired baying from the usual suspects. A writer for The Daily Signal, a Heritage Foundation project, groused last year that “in a state where life is not protected before 24 weeks and schools are promoting transgender ideology to children, Massachusetts lawmakers are now considering transferring vaccination power from parents to the government.”
Heritage drafted a presidential manifesto prehistoric enough for Donald Trump to blow his nose on it rhetorically, so it’s hardly surprising that the foundation isn’t au courant with the medical news. Vargas proposes no “transferring vaccination power”: Every state and the District of Columbia have had the power to require school vaccinations since before the vaccine-averse were born. The only losers, should the Haverhill Democrat and common sense prevail, would be prevaricators feigning devotion.
There are instances in which vaccinating children is medically contraindicated, and Vargas wouldn’t eliminate Massachusetts’ exemption for those kids. So why have years of suasion, and the transparent abuse of religious opt-outs, failed to convince his colleagues? Perhaps because anti-vaxxers make up with passion for what they lack in scientific literacy. You’d be uncomfortable, too, if you had to sit through hearings that sometimes have lasted 10 hours, listening to conspiracy theories.
Of course, those people against shots won’t bone up on science. They form a wing of the fabled “paranoid style” that’s baked into America’s political DNA. Theirs is a performative burlesque to rival Gypsy Rose Lee, covering up insincere piety with flimsy rhetorical garments.
With this difference: Lee succeeded in concealing that which she didn’t want seen. Anti-vaxxers, lacking her cleverness, bare their phony religiosity for anyone with eyes to see.
Rich Barlow is a freelance writer.