Religious Exemption, Inside Out

Instead of arguing your own religion for exemption from vaccines, why not indicate the vaccinators’ religion as NOT your own, and separation of church and state?

Thursday, June 23, 2022 Update:

After reading the comments, I realized that many thought I meant religious exemption to be used by adults in employment settings, and that is the context where I had most of my conversations on this topic with patients, and this had been the most pressing urgency until the past few weeks.

However, religious exemption, as other exemptions from vaccines, have been used mostly over the years by parents defending their children from state-ordered injection rituals.

This is where I think religious exemption is most urgent now also, protecting kids from the most highly toxic vaccine by far, the COVID vaccines, that we have seen in the 30 years of VAERS morbidity and mortality data. Parents usually receive a letter from their children's school with vaccination demands. The parents then generally respond that there will be no vaccines, or no further vaccines, for their children, on grounds of religious exemption. There should not be a need to disclose which religion or precisely why. An attorney's guidance here can be wonderfully helpful.

Wednesday, June 22, 2022

Many people have expressed to me a bashful reticence on the topic of religious exemption, as if they are afraid of not being qualified to make the claim.  I am not an attorney, but as a practicing physician, I listen to my patients’ reasons to not have the COVID vaccines, and how they plan to deal with a tyrannical, informed consent-violating employer.  We discuss medical exemption and religious exemption, and a number of my patients have selected the latter. Some have selected the former, often feeling disqualified from religious exemption for inadequate devotion.

I put forth the case below that there is still plenty of basis for religious exemption. even for someone who is a lapsed Catholic for example, or Jewish but not particularly observant, or even with an entirely secular history.

The Supreme Court has made clear that a religious exemption is based on “sincerely held belief,” not necessarily card-carrying membership in a congregation, since the Ballard case 322 US 78 (1944).   And later in the US EEOC vs IBP case, in the context of employment. 

One might sincerely believe either of the following, for example: 

“The body is the temple of the spirit.” 1 Corinthians 6:19, or

“I believe God does not want me to conduct experiments on my human DNA with mRNA technology.”

So the above relates to positive assertion of religious belief, as a reason to avoid vaccines, or at least maybe the COVID vaccines.  But what about negative assertion? 

Consider this statement:

‘I am NOT a member of the vaccine religion, and I do not wish to take their sacraments.’

Or how about this:

‘I don’t know what religion I am, but I’m definitely not THAT one.’

No lesser luminaries than Thomas Jefferson and James Madison have your back on that, as I show below.

What is a religion?

Merriam-Webster lists four definitions here, including some circular use with the word religious.  However, Webster’s third definition may be considered applicable to the cultural or psychological  superstructure that has flourished over the underlying vaccination industrial and institutional establishment’s business model / economic base. 

3:    a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith

Honoring the vaccine religion, without being a member of it

Our mostly peaceful society shows us everyday that a majority of people respect, or at least don’t actively oppose, the religions of others.  We don’t show a particular desire to argue or interfere with, berate or punish those of other religions.  Likewise, we the unvaccinated generally tolerate the free will and the healthcare decisions of those who believe in vaccines, even when the tolerance is not returned to us.  Vaccination has been treated as a citizens’ sacrament (along with tax-paying) that is cherished by governments and institutions of the last two centuries, and especially since 1986, with vaccinators usually expecting everyone to comply.

One might assume from advertisements, public health officials’ pronouncements and other widely broadcast propaganda, that there is no true immunology outside of the vaccine religion, nor any permissible non-participation.

However, since the times of Jenner, Pasteur and later Salk, knowledge of immunology and microscopy have advanced tremendously.  Those of us who study immunology now have an appreciation of the vast array of immune cells and their synchronized and cooperative actions in the defeat of invading pathogens.  The science of immunology is vast and highly detailed.   Here is a basic overview of the major players and their functions. We have seen a diverse array of immune cells and signaling chemicals known as cytokines interacting in a way that overshadows the small part of the immune system that vaccines act on, the 0.004% of the cells in our blood, B cells, that produce antibodies.  One might argue that B cells are as much as 5% of our white blood cells, which are recognized as the more specifically functioning immune cells.  However, if one considers that oxygen delivery (a system of O2 drop off and CO2 pickup messenger service) by red blood cells (RBCs) is an immune function as well, then B cells and the antibodies produced by them are a vanishingly small part of a vast and ubiquitous immune symphony.  Why do I call RBC’s messenger service an immune service?  Because anaerobic bacteria are the majority of our indigenous flora, and robust oxygenated blood flow is likely essential to keeping them in check.

Vaccines have negative effects as well.  We now know that the COVID vaccines have many devastating effects, one of which is to sharply reduce Type I interferon, as Seneff, Nigh, Kyriakopoulos and McCullough showed. Type I interferon is the strongest molecule that our body makes against viruses and bacteria generally.  The COVID-vaccinated have lost this precious substance and much of their former pathogen-fighting ability, and thus they keep getting sick with COVID, herpes zoster and other infections.

Vaccination qualifies as a religion also by the following criteria

Consecration

Liquid, as an entity, has no inherent religious value.  But then a priest consecrates wine, which transubstantiates the wine into the blood of Christ, by a process honored by the Christian religion, reinforced with two millenia of faith and over a billion of the faithful.  Now a previously ordinary liquid acquires religious value. 

Similarly, the content of a syringe, when labelled ”vaccine” by a public health official (in close coziness with a drug company) has become consecrated, and is now assumed by the faithful to strengthen a person against infectious disease by a mystical process, with some gaps in the explanation and testing, but at least reinforced by the faith of its adherents.

Sacrament

What is the sacrament of the vaccination religion?  The act of receiving, usually by injection, the consecrated liquid bearing the holy name “vaccine,” a name which confers special and unchallenged value in a way that the words “injection,” “shot,” or “intramuscular treatment” do not.  Is receiving this sacrament superstition?  Is it idolatry?  Am I too judgmental for using such words here? 

Scripture

The CDC, the FDA, the NIH and prominent politicians speak with solemn authority.  They are the repository of knowledge and policy for their flock.  The masses receive their written and spoken pronouncements as another religion’s devout flock that receives the sermons of its religious leaders.

Blasphemy against the vaccination religion

Now here are some ideas that are held by vaccine skeptics.  These are not part of, and not particularly welcome in, the vaccination religion   Humans, as all known vertebrates, have an innate immune system, the larger of two immune divisions. It is always on call, and is the more constantly vigilant of the two major immune divisions. Innate immunity has never been observed to be enhanced or benefitted by vaccination.  Now the smaller of the two, the adaptive portion of the human immune system, has been observed to be affected by vaccination, but the lack of saline placebo-controlled studies leaves us wondering to what extent and whether beneficially or not.   Vaccine-induced immunity is questionable, wanes with time, and has been shown to be negative at various times throughout history, leaving vaccinated people with higher morbidity and mortality than the unvaccinated, including with smallpox, polio, mumps and pertussis vaccines.  Recorded history’s largest infectious diseases, scarlet fever, cholera and bubonic plague, never had vaccines, but disappeared completely with indoor plumbing and sanitation, “when humanity stopped drinking its own sewage.”

Religious exemption turned 180 degrees

So let’s say a religious exemption consists simply of this language:

“I am not a member of the vaccine religion, and I do not take the sacraments of that religion.  So no thanks.”

On what basis in US law can we assert this?

The First Amendment

The first two clauses of the First Amendment to the US Constitution address religion:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion [‘the Establishment Clause’], or prohibiting the free exercise thereof [‘the Free Exercise Clause.’] . . . ”  [The First Amendment then goes on to discuss free speech and three additional rights.]

The Establishment Clause seems especially useful here as a negative assertion, a prohibition of state-sanctioned religion.  Discussion of separation of church and state goes back to at least the writings of 18th century legal philosopher Montesquieu, and was most strongly championed in Europe by John Locke.  In colonial Virginia, Thomas Jefferson had advocated a “wall of separation” between the church and the state.  The Anglican Church was still the established religion in his home colony of Virginia.  At the urging of Baptists there, both Jefferson and Madison argued against state support for any specific religion.  The basis of their opposition was that citizens’ natural rights to religious liberty were violated when being forced to pay taxes to support a religion they did not follow.  Since the time of the adoption of the First Amendment, US courts have upheld this separation.

Every US state, except California, Connecticut, Maine, and New York, honor religious exemptions from vaccination.  Please see this map of your state government-acknowledged rights of adults and children from the non-profit National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC).  

Map compiled and © by the National Vaccine Information Center, https://www.NVIC.org

By the way, if you think vaccine skepticism began only in the last year or two, please see this much earlier history (not to mention 19th century history).  NVIC was started by Barbara Loe Fisher four decades ago, in 1982, in order to provide resources to parents for informed choices and to fight medical tyranny.  Her Australian contemporary, Meryl Dorey, has championed human rights and informed consent regarding vaccines for decades, and fortunately is here with us on Substack:

Please don’t despair if you live in CA, CT, ME or NY.  If you are a healthcare worker, the January 2022 CMS ruling by the Supreme Court acknowledged religious and medical exemptions to vaccine mandates, which is the first time that I, a medical expert witness on vaccine injury, have seen such exemptions from vaccines acknowledged on a federal level. 

Furthermore, even if you do not work in healthcare, let’s say your state does not honor religious exemptions from vaccination. Then, with your attorney, you may want to look into Title VII, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which specifically prohibits discrimination against employees on religious grounds.  Also, the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution specifically prohibits such discrimination. 

As before, I must remind readers that I am not an attorney, and any statement from me that may resemble legal advice is likely a means to get us both in trouble.  A search for a helpful attorney may begin with “constitutional attorney near me,” or the like.