Should parents, students and employees be allowed to claim religious exemptions from vaccine mandates? That’s the question an increasing number of state lawmakers are being asked to decide as they consider a new wave of proposed bills.
Arizona is one of eight states that have introduced bills during the 2025 legislative session to establish or expand exemptions to school vaccine mandates, according to Dawn Richardson, advocacy director for the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC).
“Vaccine mandates for school and childcare attendance and their corresponding vaccine exemptions have been in state law for decades,” Richardson said. But this year, “more states have bills to expand these exemptions than to restrict or remove them.”
In 2010, Richardson created and launched the NVIC Advocacy Portal, which provides free information about proposed state vaccine laws. Since then, she and her team have analyzed, tracked and issued positions on over 1,000 vaccine-related bills across the U.S.
“Until medical mandates are a relic of history — and that day is coming — religious exemptions are the primary way to avoid medical coercion,” said Children’s Health Defense CEO Mary Holland.
According to Richardson, only three states — Hawaii, Massachusetts and New Jersey — proposed legislation this year attempting to remove school vaccine mandate exemptions. However, Hawaii lawmakers, under pressure from constituents, voted last month to table the bill, which would have repealed the state’s religious exemption from vaccine mandates.
Meanwhile, other states are advancing legislation that strengthens or expands vaccine exemptions. For instance, Alabama lawmakers on April 3 passed a bill that specifies that a parent or guardian’s written declaration is “sufficient documentation” to exempt his or her child from a vaccine requirement for religious reasons.
Alabama lawmakers are also considering a bill that would require private and church schools to accept religious exemptions to vaccine requirements.
On March 26, Utah’s governor signed into law a measure to ensure that public school students’ vaccine exemption forms don’t expire and that they travel with them when the students transfer to another school.
Some of the state bills proposed this year focus on exemptions from vaccine mandates in the workplace rather than at school.
For example, Texas lawmakers are considering a law that would require healthcare facilities that have vaccine mandates to honor exemptions for “reasons of conscience, including a religious belief.”
Texas also introduced three other bills related to expanding or improving vaccine exemptions, according to legislative data Richardson shared with The Defender.
‘Momentum is gaining to remove vaccine mandates’
Holland noted that a handful of states allow only medical exemptions, not religious exemptions. Those states are California, New York, Connecticut and Maine. “They make even legitimate medical exemptions virtually impossible to obtain.”
“The good news,” Holland said, “is that Idaho just became the first medical freedom state, by outlawing any medical intervention mandates that prohibit people from participating in social life based on medical status. Likely, this will be a template for other states going forward.”
Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed the law almost a week after he vetoed a previous version of the bill, citing concerns it would have prohibited schools from sending home “sick students with highly contagious conditions.”
The new version of the bill clarifies that schools and businesses can turn away students, employees or customers who are sick, but they cannot require a medical intervention, including a vaccine.
The new version also specified that schools cannot exclude unvaccinated children during an outbreak of a contagious disease they are not vaccinated against.
Bills that outright prohibit vaccine mandates ‘much preferable’
Richardson said bills like the one passed in Idaho are part of a positive trend she and her team are seeing across recent legislative sessions, including this one.
“Momentum is gaining to remove vaccine mandates,” she said, “but medical trade and pharmaceutical lobbyists are working against medical freedom and informed consent.”
“This is why it is so important for people to speak with their legislators about how prohibiting vaccine mandates and requiring informed consent to vaccination without penalty for saying ‘no’ is very important to them,” Richardson said.
Bills that outright prohibit vaccine mandates — rather than just ensuring that a person can apply for an exemption — are “much preferable” in Richardson’s view because they “make vaccine exemptions not even necessary.”
“As we saw with school vaccine exemptions,” Richardson said, “sometimes [exemptions] can get taken away as evidenced in recent years in California, Connecticut, Maine, New York and Vermont.”
‘People are waking up’
NVIC’s mission is to prevent vaccine injuries through public education and to advocate for informed consent protections in medical policies and public health laws.
Commenting on state legislative action since 2010, NVIC’s Executive Director Theresa Wrangham said she has seen a shift toward more proposed legislation to protect informed consent and people’s choice to vaccinate or not vaccinate without penalty.
When NVIC first began, Wrangham said she saw a “lot of movement to try to restrict exemptions.” But overall, that’s changed. “I think people are waking up …That’s grassroots. That’s people getting involved.”
Wrangham said it’s important for families to educate themselves about vaccine risks versus benefits as they make their decisions.
There is no “risk-free” option, she said. “There’s just the ability to make a decision — an informed decision around what risk you’re willing to take. That’s really what informed consent is about. Let’s make sure everybody has good information. Let’s not let our fear run us.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
