ArticleSocial science & medicine (1982)2021
"If a rabbi did say 'you have to vaccinate,' we wouldn't": Unveiling the secular logics of religious exemption and opposition to vaccination.
Article in Social science & medicine (1982), 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 80 citations in OpenAlex.
- Approaches to engaging faith communities in public health efforts regarding vaccination, genetics, and colorectal cancer: a systematic review.BMC public health · 2025Pooled it
- Barriers and enablers to vaccination in the ultra-orthodox Jewish population: a systematic review.Frontiers in public health · 2023Pooled it
- Social Identities and Vaccine Exemptions in the United States: The Role of Religiosity, Partisanship, and Vaccine Hesitancy.Journal of community health · 2026Article
- Religious beliefs and practices, political orientation, and distrust in healthcare predict attitudes toward mRNA vaccines in the United States.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Religious beliefs and practices, political orientation, and distrust in healthcare predict attitudes toward mRNA vaccines in the United States.PLOS global public health · 2026Article
- Heterogeneity in vaccination attitudes and behavior within an outwardly homogenous religious group: a cross-sectional study of the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish population in Safed, Israel.International journal for equity in health · 2025Article
- Messages dissemination regarding covid-19 by street posters: the case of the ultra-Orthodox community in Israel.International journal for equity in health · 2025Article
- Developing and validating a culturally tailored questionnaire to assess COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in Israel's ultraorthodox Jewish population.Human vaccines & immunotherapeutics · 2024Article
- The four "R"s: Strategies for tailoring science for religious publics and their prices.Public understanding of science (Bristol, England) · 2024Article
- The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on UK parents' attitudes towards routine childhood vaccines: A mixed-methods study.PloS one · 2024Article
- COVID-19 vaccine decision-making in remote Alaska between November 2020 and November 2021.International journal of circumpolar health · 2023Article
- The Impact of Meso-Level Factors on SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine Early Hesitancy in the United States.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- Deliberation, context, emotion and trust - understanding the dynamics of adults' COVID-19 vaccination decisions in Germany.BMC public health · 2023Article
- Article
- Obscured inequity: How focusing on rates of disparities can conceal inequities in the reasons why adolescents are unvaccinated.PloS one · 2023Article
- Determinants of COVID-19 vaccination worldwide: WORLDCOV, a retrospective observational study.Frontiers in public health · 2023Observational
- Effect of religious fatalism and concern about new variants on the acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Tailoring immunisation programmes in a time of SARS-CoV-2: What can be learnt by comparing the findings of childhood and COVID-19 vaccine evaluation studies in an underserved population?Public health in practice (Oxford, England) · 2022Article
- "We've all got the virus inside us now": Disaggregating public health relations and responsibilities for health protection in pandemic London.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2022Article
- Pandemic preparedness means policy makers need to work with social scientists.Lancet (London, England) · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Maintaining 'faith' in vaccination has emerged as a public health challenge amidst outbreaks of preventable disease among religious minorities and rising claims to 'exemption' from vaccine mandates. Outbreaks of measles and coronavirus have been particularly acute among Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods in North America, Europe and Israel, yet no comparative studies have been conducted to discern the shared and situated influences on vaccine decision-making. This paper synthesises qualitative research into vaccine decision-making among Orthodox Jews in the United Kingdom and Israel during the 2014-15 and 2018-19 measles epidemics, and 2020-21 coronavirus pandemic. The methods integrate 66 semi-structured informal interviews conducted with parents, formal and informal healthcare practitioners, and religious leaders, as well as analysis of tailored non-vaccination advocacy events and literature. The paper argues that the discourse of 'religious' exemption and opposition to vaccination obscures the diverse practices and philosophies that inform vaccine decisions, and how religious law and leaders form a contingent influence. Rather than viewing religion as the primary framework through which vaccine decisions are made, Orthodox Jewish parents were more concerned with safety, trust and choice in similar ways to 'secular' logics of non-vaccination. Yet, religious frameworks were mobilised, and at times politicised, to suit medico-legal discourse of 'exemption' from coercive or mandatory vaccine policies. By conceptualising tensions around protection as 'political immunities,' the paper offers a model to inform social science understandings of how health, law and religion intersect in contemporary vaccine opposition.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.