Does God want your kids vaccinated?

A precept of American law is that, absent a special relationship, an individual is under “>Slate that parents who don't vaccinate their kids should be sued for damages–or criminally charged. That's going a bit far, and there are a lot of moving parts in American jurisprudence that would make such a regime challenging, to say the least. But the consequences of refusing vaccines are real.

Just ask the folks at Kenneth Copeland Ministries in Neward, Texas. There the “>I blame “The View.” OK, I don't. But I find the anti-vaccine crowd to be among American society's more troubling social problems. Seriously. Vaccines are the classic public good–and they only work best, in particular by protecting from infection those who are too young to be vaccinated, if everyone buys in.

I also don't see how Christians can think that taking health precautions means not trusting God. Do the same people not wash their hands after using the bathroom?

This “>this or “>this or “>2012 article for Christianity Today explains how if you love your neighbor, you'll get your kids vaccinated:

Vaccinations work on the theory of “herd immunity”: As long as most people in a given population are immune, the risk of susceptible people getting sick is very small. So people who can't be immunized because they are too young (newborn babies), too old, too sick (people with immune system problems), and people for whom immunizations simply didn't “take,” are protected by the immunity of the “herd,” namely, those of us who got our shots.

…

What concerns me about the anti-vaccination movement is not merely the fact that people are so easily persuaded by falsified claims about vaccine risks, nor the tragedy of people losing their lives to diseases that were (thanks to vaccines) nearly eradicated. Rather, I'm concerned that so many people seem willing to let others carry the supposed burden of vaccination so that they don't have to. To me, that's a failure of the commandment to love our neighbors: our infant neighbors, our elderly neighbors, and our immune-compromised neighbors. That's a disease of the soul for which the only treatment is love—best shown in the God who became man to bear our infirmities in his own body.

So what should Christians do? First, they should be educated about the real risks of vaccines–the really, really small risks. Second, they shouldn't pretend that God eschews good medicine. And then they should stop endangering the lives of others because, you know, that's not a very Christian thing to do.