The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) today called for an end to religious and philosophical vaccine exemptions for children attending daycare and school in the U.S.
In an updated policy statement published in Pediatrics, the AAP said universal immunization is necessary to keep children and employees safe. The organization said there is a place for “legitimate” medical exemptions, but nonmedical exemptions are “problematic.”
“We recommend that vaccination is required for participation in certain public activities, such as school and daycare, and if you choose not to vaccinate, you’re essentially choosing to exclude yourself from those settings,” lead author Dr. Jesse Hackell told MedPage Today.
He added:
“We recognize that excluding a child from public education does have problems, and yet, we reach the conclusion that, on balance, assuring the safety of the school and daycare environment outweighs that risk because there are other educational opportunities available.”
According to the AAP statement, all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico require proof of immunization to attend daycare and school, and all of them grant medical exemptions. However, 45 of those also have religious exemptions, and 15 allow personal belief, philosophical or conscientious objection exemptions.
Only California, Connecticut, Maine, New York and West Virginia don’t allow nonmedical exemptions. Massachusetts is debating a law that would eliminate religious exemptions there.
The AAP statement said reasons for granting medical exemptions can vary, but typically require a demonstrated allergy to a vaccine component, previous serious adverse reaction to a vaccine or its components, or serious underlying immunosuppression.
Some states, including New York, have been tightening their medical exemption requirements in recent years. Some state medical boards, including in California, have sanctioned or targeted the medical licenses of doctors who write medical exemptions.
“Medically indicated exemptions, when granted appropriately, typically do not have a significant impact on overall community vaccination coverage,” the statement’s authors wrote, but allowing other types of exemptions does, and immunization rates have been dropping in recent years.
Kim Mack Rosenberg, general counsel for Children’s Health Defense, told The Defender that religious freedom is a “hot-button” issue nationwide. She said:
“The AAP’s statement calling for an end to religious exemptions to immunization ignores constitutionally protected rights regarding religious freedom and potentially is in violation of other laws as well. AAP blatantly suggests that schools discriminate against families with faith-based reasons to not take some or all vaccines.
“To claim otherwise is to play word games — just as AAP suggests that families are not forced to take vaccines that conflict with their religious beliefs but instead that families simply must choose, in those instances, between attending school and staying true to their religious values.”
Dr. Michelle Perro, author of “What’s Making Our Children Sick?: How Industrial Food Is Causing an Epidemic of Chronic Illness, and What Parents (and Doctors) Can Do About It,” criticized the move by the AAP.
“As a pediatrician committed to informed consent and patient rights based on non-biased science, I strongly support the continued access to medical, religious and philosophical vaccine exemptions,” she said.
Perro said many vaccines are produced using cell lines originally derived from aborted fetal tissue. This poses a moral and ethical conflict for some families. She added:
“In addition, vaccines contain adjuvants and excipients such as aluminum salts, polysorbate 80 and formaldehyde that create neurotoxicity and immune dysregulation in some children. Compounding these issues is the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program [VICP], which grants vaccine manufacturers legal immunity, leaving families with no recourse when vaccine injuries occur.
“In a system that removes liability from Pharma while simultaneously mandating their products, preserving exemptions is essential to protect not only parental choice, medical ethics, and the fundamental right to informed consent, but protecting the health of our children.”
In an X post today, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. criticized the VICP and vowed to fix it.
“The VICP is broken, and I intend to fix it,” Kennedy said. “I will not allow the VICP to continue to ignore its mandate and fail its mission of quickly and fairly compensating vaccine-injured individuals.”
‘Fundamental right’ of parents addressed in Supreme Court ruling this year
Legally requiring immunization is key to high immunization rates, the authors said, highlighting court rulings from 1905, 1922 and 1944 as “legal justification” for their stance. Mack Rosenberg said:
“AAP is relying on old case law to support its argument, and that case law is being challenged and questioned, and new case law upholding First Amendment religious freedom and also parental rights in a variety of contexts has recently been issued.”
New York civil rights attorney Sujata Gibson, who has represented numerous plaintiffs challenging denials of their vaccine exemptions, said the AAP’s argument disregarded the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling in the Mahmoud v. Taylor case. Gibson said:
“The Court reaffirmed that parents have a fundamental right to raise their children according to their religious beliefs, and any government policy infringing on this right faces strict scrutiny — the highest legal standard. Blanket bans on religious exemptions, as the AAP proposes, fail this test. …
“Forcing families to choose between their faith and their children’s education is unnecessary. Forty-five states already balance public health with religious accommodations, proving it’s possible to protect both. States can no longer rely on vague claims of ‘public health’ to justify mandatory medical interventions. Under strict scrutiny, they must provide concrete evidence — something the AAP’s proposal lacks.
“The Supreme Court’s message is clear: a child’s access to public education cannot be conditioned on a family violating their deeply held religious convictions.”
Public support for religious exemptions is growing
A survey conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, published in January, found public support for religious exemptions from school vaccine requirements doubled, from 20% in 2019 to 39% in 2025.
The survey also showed that only 52% of U.S. adults support having their state require vaccination as a condition of school attendance.
The study authors said school-entry vaccination rates have fallen, while exemptions have gone up. They reported that states with nonmedical vaccine exemptions have had “steady increases,” although that number only reached 3% in the 2022-2023 school year.
“The ease of requirements to obtain nonmedical exemptions can have a significant impact on the rate of exemptions and immunizations,” the authors said.
In its statement, the AAP appeared to question the legitimacy of people’s religious beliefs. It said no major world religious traditions “include scriptural or doctrinal guidelines that preclude adherents from being vaccinated.”
The organization noted that some people develop beliefs drawn from independent religious traditions or diverse denominational perspectives within major religions. Those perspectives are “nonetheless, thought of as ‘religious’ commitments by those who hold them,” but they are too complicated for effective interpretation, the AAP said.
While legislatures are “reticent” to interfere with the free exercise of religion, allowing for exemptions based on such beliefs can substantially affect public health, the organization said.
‘AAP and many of its members benefit from high vaccine uptake’
The AAP is a professional organization representing 67,000 pediatricians in the U.S. However, it is also a lobbying organization that has spent between $748,000 and $1,180,000 annually advocating for its members over the previous six years, according to the government website Open Secrets.
The organization’s funding for that work comes, in part, from annual contributions from corporate sponsors, including vaccine manufacturers Moderna, Merck, Sanofi, Abbott Laboratories, GSK and CSL Seqirus.
In today’s statement, the AAP said none of the authors have relevant financial conflicts of interest to disclose and that any conflicts “have been resolved through a process approved by the Board of Directors.”
However, the government Open Payments database shows that lead author Hackell has taken money from Merck, Pfizer, Seqirus and GSK since 2018. Author Dr. Lisa M. Kafer has received payments from the same companies, as well as others. Most other authors are university researchers and are not listed in the database.
The thousands of dollars worth of payments to the authors indicate a relationship between the Big Pharma companies that make the vaccines and the AAP members working to make sure vaccine exemptions are scaled back.
“AAP and many of its members benefit from high vaccine uptake, and this conflict of interest should not be ignored,” said Mack Rosenberg.
Related articles in The Defender
- Public Support for Religious Exemptions Nearly Doubled Over Past 6 Years
- Hawaii, Religious Exemptions and Measles: Will the Playbook Work Again?
- New York’s Attack on Medical Exemptions Gives School Officials Power to Override Doctors on Vaccines
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.
