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From the outset, vaccines have raised proxy fears about social upheaval.

Historically, vaccines have troubled religious communities tying natural immunity to spiritual purity.

Concern that scientific misinformation drives low uptake may be masking a larger public health failure.

“There has always been vaccine hesitancy,” religious studies scholar Kira Ganga Kieffer argues of the United States in Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America, published today by Princeton University Press. “Since their inception in the late eighteenth century,” with efforts to inoculate against smallpox in colonial Massachusetts, “vaccines have provoked moral quandaries, and sometimes vigorous disagreement, among everyday Americans.”

The claim that vaccine hesitancy channels religious expression, rather than scientific ignorance, forms a welcome bid to neutralize this polarizing topic and engage with religious communities where they actually are, not where public health officials might prefer them to be. As Kieffer notes of the distinctions that emerge, “None of the world’s major religious traditions prohibit vaccination. In fact, most religious leaders encourage vaccination against vaccine-preventable diseases because it saves lives.”

Mandates and Medical Freedom

The protesters lining the entrance to a pop-up clinic at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, challenging vaccination against COVID-19 in January 2021, were from this perspective voicing concerns similar to their 18th-century counterparts. Bearing signs that warned, “Save Your Soul, Turn Back Now,” the protesters saw the newly available mRNA vaccines—approved and distributed at speed by the first Trump administration—as part of a larger battle against federal authority and mandates they found intrusive and coercive. In the years since, according to Kieffer, that battle has hardened into a populous, well-funded movement for religious freedom framed as medical liberty, natural health, and the right to be left alone.

Many will remember the aerial footage of Dodger Stadium at the time, with thousands of cars snaking slowly around the huge complex. To observers and much of the press, the long lines underscored tremendous pent-up demand for protection against SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19 and long........

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