Theme: Impurity

No major faith explicitly opposes vaccinations. On the contrary, all major faiths in the U.K. have urged their followers to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

Nonetheless, several concerns about vaccinations have been identified that arise from religious considerations. These concerns can be divided into four groups.

• Violations of dietary norms, such as blood components and pharmaceutical excipients of porcine or bovine origin.
• Violations of religious codes of purity, such as cell lines with foetal origins or HPV vaccinations protecting against a sexually transmitted disease.
• Defence of the natural order by letting events take their course, which is often reflected in rejection of interference with divine providence.
• Religious alternatives to vaccination, such as faith or prayer to fight diseases.

Although religiosity is not consistently associated with higher vaccine hesitancy when conducting international comparisons, there is tentative evidence that vaccine hesitancy is greater among the religious in an American sample. Vaccination rates are also particularly low among some fundamentalist religious communities around the world.