Parents Fight Back With Rising Use Of Religious Vaccine Exemptions For Their Children

Summer has officially come to a close. Families wrapped up beach and/or mountain vacations last weekend as kids now sit in the classroom, hopefully learning non-woke math and critical reading skills. A notable trend this school year is the increasing number of parents choosing to circumvent government-enforced vaccine requirements for their children through non-medical religious exemptions. 

Local non-profit media outlet Maryland Matters cited new data showing an increasing number of parents have opted their children out of vaccination requirements through non-medical religious exemption. The trend surged after draconian requirements pushed by an overreaching government during the Covid era. 

Here’s more on the data from Maryland Matters: 

The number rarely rises above a percent or two of an incoming kindergarten class, typically accounting for no more than a couple hundred children per year. But that means that in the years since 2002, a total of more than 10,000 kindergartners have attended public and private schools without vaccination records, according to historical data from the Maryland Department of Health.

The rising percent of religious exemptions in recent years may point to increasing rates of vaccine hesitancy among families, said Daniel Salmon, a professor and director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“We’ve seen a post-COVID increase,” Salmon said. “With COVID … things got really polarized with more misinformation and disinformation. Vaccinations became a very political topic. And that’s not helpful.”

Maryland law requires doctors to inject children with several big pharma vaccines before they enter kindergarten (and many more after) to protect themselves and their classmates from transmissible diseases, such as polio, measles, and chickenpox, among many others.

Tracking vaccine hesitancy through the Maryland health data suggests parents are becoming increasingly aware of the potential concerns surrounding increasing government-mandated vaccinations for their children. 

Here’s a straightforward breakdown of the vaccine hesitancy rise of Maryland parents via the media outlet:

• The earliest data readily available from the state is from the 2002-2003 school year, in which 0.2% of kindergartners got a religious exemption, or about 126 kids out of roughly 63,000 entering kindergarten that year.

• The rate increased steadily over the years: Ten years later, for example, about 0.6% of kids had religious exemptions, resulting in about 419 kids not receiving vaccinations in 2012-2013.

• Religious exemptions spiked in 2019-2020 when 2.7% of kindergartners, or 1,641 kids, opted out of vaccination requirements. The COVID-19 pandemic went into full swing in the spring of 2020, so those families would have opted out prior to the the rise in cases in the United States.

• Since the 2021-2022 school year, at least 1 percent of kindergartners in Maryland had a medical exemption – a couple hundred a year.

Perhaps the expanding vaccine schedule for kids over the last three decades has something to do with the vaccine hesitancy among millennial parents. 

Axios shared a nationwide breakdown of where parents have used non-medical exemptions for their children the most.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump criticized the number of childhood vaccines in a video with Robert F. Kennedy Jr in mid-July. 

Whoops. Seems like RFK Jr.’s son posted and has since deleted video of a call between RFK Jr. and Trump after the shooting. In the video Trump repeats his old (false) claims about childhood vaccines, suggesting the vaccine schedule causes injuries in babies. https://t.co/K4RWXfoudS pic.twitter.com/KZcSBVtxWE

— Brandy Zadrozny (@BrandyZadrozny) July 16, 2024

Hmm… 

But, they do cause illness and injuries in babies and children. Why do you support harming kids? pic.twitter.com/D3mjtRClEM

— Chris Martenson, PhD (@chrismartenson) July 16, 2024

Nothing to see here. It’s not illegal to ask questions. 

The prevailing trend is that an increasing number of parents are opting their children out of government-mandated big-pharma vaccines. We wonder why… And maybe Trump is right.