Vaccination and religion

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[edit] Historical

When vaccination was introduced into UK public policy, and adoption followed overseas, there was opposition from both Protestant and Catholic churches[citation needed].

Timothy Dwight
Timothy Dwight

For example, Timothy Dwight IV, a Congregationalist minister and Yale university president, held that vaccination thwarted God's will, saying:

If God had decreed from all eternity that a certain person should die of smallpox, it would be a frightful sin to avoid and annul that decree by the trick of vaccination.[citation needed]

Several Boston clergymen and devout physicians formed the Anti-vaccination Society in 1798, only two years after Jenner's publication of smallpox vaccination. Others complained that the practice was dangerous, going so far as to demand that doctors who carried out these procedures be tried for attempted murder.[1]

[edit] Current

Of the religious denominations normally encountered in the West, only the Christian Scientists and the Dutch Orthodox Reformed church (about 2% of the population of the Netherlands) oppose vaccination and other immunizations[citation needed].

Islam and Judaism, religions with dietary prohibitions which regard particular animals as unclean, make exceptions for medical treatments derived from those animals.[2] [3]

The Vatican Curia has expressed concern about the rubella vaccine's embryonic cell origin, but has nevertheless concluded that until an alternative becomes available, it is better for Catholics to use the existing vaccine than none at all[4] [5].

Recently the approval of the Gardasil vaccine against the sexually transmitted disease human papillomavirus has caused several socially conservative organizations such as the Family Research Council (FRC) to oppose mandatory vaccination on moral grounds.

Our primary concern is with the message that would be delivered to nine- to 12-year-olds with the administration of the vaccines. Care must be taken not to communicate that such an intervention makes all sex 'safe'.[6]

[edit] References

  1. ^ "X. Theological Opposition to Inoculation, Vaccination, and the Use of Anaesthetics" in A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, Andrew Dickson White, 1898, retrieved 15 September 2006 from http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/whitem10.html
  2. ^ "Drugs of Porcine Origin and Their Clinical Alternatives" 2004, retrieved as drugs-of-porcine-origin.pdf from http://www.npc.co.uk/med_partnership/assets/ on 15 September 2006
  3. ^ WHO correspondence 17 July 2001, retrieved on 15 September 2006 from http://www.immunize.org/concerns/ as porcine.pdf
  4. ^ MORAL REFLECTIONS ON VACCINES PREPARED FROM CELLS DERIVED FROM ABORTED HUMAN FOETUSES, a Vatican document published in Medicina e Morale, a journal published by the Center for Bioethics of the Catholic University in Rome.
  5. ^ [1] Pontifical Academy for Life correspondence, 9 June 2005
  6. ^ FRC correspondence to the US government, as quoted in "Moral majority take on GSK and Merck over cancer drugs", The Independent, 11 June 2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article755931.ece
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