American Academy of Pediatrics calls for ending religious exemptions for school vaccine mandates

The nation's largest advocacy group for pediatricians recommended the total elimination of nonmedical exemptions for childhood vaccine mandates as a condition of attending school or child care in a policy statement Monday, provoking fierce rebukes from anti-mandate groups and doctors.

"All 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have regulations requiring proof of immunization as a condition for child care and school attendance as a public health strategy to protect children in these settings and to secondarily serve as a mechanism to promote timely immunization of children by their caregivers," the American Academy of Pediatrics said. 

But most states "also have a heterogeneous collection of regulations and laws that allow nonmedical reasons for exemption," 45 of them specifically for religious reasons and 15 for "personal beliefs," "philosophical" or "conscientious objection" exemptions.

AAP portrays religious objectors from institutional religions as acting against their faith traditions, echoing arguments made against religious exemptions from COVID-19 vaccine mandates, though courts have rejected an institutional fidelity test for religious objectors.

"Among the major world religious traditions, none include scriptural or doctrinal guidelines that preclude adherents from being vaccinated," the policy statement says. "In fact, the leaders of some religious groups have highlighted that vaccination can be one important way to protect oneself and one’s neighbors and have thus suggested that there is a moral or religious obligation to seek vaccination."

"In an act of desperation, it appears AAP is pulling out all the stops to strip away your rights," Children's Health Defense, founded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wrote on X. "This should alarm EVERYONE, despite your beliefs — states should NOT be in full control of your children's health."

"Are we in some dystopian rerun of 2020?" Kat Lindley, director of the Independent Medical Association’s Fellowship Program, said in an email blast.

"The AAP’s tone-deaf proposal ignores the hard lessons of the COVID-19 era," she wrote. "Parents aren’t sheep, and they’re done with government-funded healthcare bureaucrats playing doctor with their kids."

IMA was formerly known as the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, which promoted ivermectin as a COVID treatment.