Ky. mom says she doesn't vaccinate her kids due to religious belief; meanwhile, number of U.S. measles cases hits 25-year high

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention photo

As the number of measles cases in the U.S. reach their highest count in 25 years, a Lexington mom holds firm to her faith-driven belief to no longer vaccinate her children, Mary Meehan reports for WEKU-FM. 

Toni Wilkinson is one of many parents who cite religious reasons for not vaccinating children. She told Meehan she did that after learning that stem-cell tissue from abortions had been used to produce some vaccines.

“That became a big issue for me because we're very pro-life,” she said.

A few vaccines have been developed using human cell cultures derived from two legal abortions in the 1960s and are maintained in laboratories, but no additional fetal tissue has been added since they were originally created, According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,

Wilkinson has seven children, all of them home-schooled. She told Meehan that her two oldest children are fully vaccinated, the next two received the required shots only until middle school, and the three youngest are not vaccinated at all.

From Jan. 1 to April 26, the CDC reports there have been 704 cases of measles confirmed in 22 states, including Kentucky. It is the greatest number of cases reported in the U.S. since 1994, and has been blamed on a decline in vaccinations.

"Kentucky is among 47 states that allow some form of religious exemption from vaccination requirements for children to attend public schools," Meehan notes.

West Virginia has no religious exemption, and has a 98% vaccination rate, well above the national median rate of 94.3%, Meehan notes. Kentucky's rate is 92.6%.

In June 2017, Kentucky's health cabinet made it easier for Kentucky adults to get religious based vaccine exemptions for their children by allowing them to get the exemption form online, have it notarized and then simply submit it to their school upon enrollment -- instead of having to obtain it from their health-care provider along with their signature. And it looks like that's not going to change.

“There has not been any talk about eliminating exemptions to vaccines in Kentucky that I'm aware of at this point,” Kentucky Public Health Commissioner Jeffrey Howard told Meehan.

Meehan reports, "Howard said he supports vaccines and that there are a lot of misunderstandings and myths surrounding them. But, he says, Kentucky is a place where people want to protect personal liberties such as whether or not to vaccinate a child."

Meehan reports  that no major American religion explicitly seeks to forbid vaccines and some within the Catholic church even encourage them -- though a subset of church members, like Wilkinson, reject vaccines on moral grounds related to the past use of fetal cells in some of them.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb was commissioner of the federal Food and Drug Administration from 2017 until earlier this month. He is now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Gottlieb told Meehan that he added that he didn't think the federal government should mandate vaccinations, "because I think these are issues that have long been held left to state supervision for a lot of good reasons."

However, he also said that this surge in measles infections is forcing public health officials to make some tough policy decisions. “We're at the point right now where we're starting to see outbreaks of such a scope that we are going to reach a tipping point and perhaps some point soon," he told Meehan.

Toni Wilkinson told Meehan that she and her friends who have made a similar decision have faced backlash, with both family and on social media, but she still stands by her decision.

“God places children in families for a reason,” she told Meehan.

She also told Meehan that she has brief moments of doubt. “I think there was still a little fear of like, what if my child got what is considered a vaccine-preventable disease, what am I going to feel?”