woman holding hand up against vaccination

Taking a COVID-19 vaccine is not just about individual rights and choices; it also is about how those rights and choices affect the greater community. That’s according to Brian Kane, Ph.D., of the Catholic Health Association, who spoke Monday during a LeadingAge member call about how Catholic provider organizations are handling religious exemption requests to inoculation mandates.

CHA represents 20% of all healthcare providers in the United States, serving one in every seven patients at 670 hospitals and 1,500 continuing care facilities. 

“The consensus of most in the Catholic Church is, we should be taking these vaccines, and there’s not a good reason to oppose them,” said Kane, CHA senior director of ethics. “We talk about moral responsibility and, even, rights in the Catholic tradition. We can’t say that without, in the same breath, saying there is an obligation to the common good, a responsibility to other people in the community. It’s not just about individual rights and choices, but how those rights and choices affect the vulnerable in the community.

“Not taking the vaccine is compromising the health of the vulnerable. The equation goes more toward the care of other people rather than serving an individual right,” he continued.

Few religions worldwide are against vaccines, with the exception of Christian Scientists, and most lead toward supporting vaccination “for the good of the community,” Kane said. 

Three suggestions he had for long-term care facilities:

  1. Work with religious groups to speak to issues at the community level.
  2. Have two people at a community read every religious exemption application. If those two people disagree about whether the exemption request should be granted, then the issue should move to a third person, who will serve as a tiebreaker. 
  3. Set a clear expectation that a request has to be a sincere religious belief — and a consistent belief held for some time by an individual — to qualify for a religious exemption.

When faced with an employee who is looking for a religious exemption from vaccination — and only 5% of exemption requests are for religious reasons, Kane said — it’s difficult for someone to have a consistent position that would qualify under federal law for that exemption. Someone who forgoes all vaccinations over their religious beliefs, for example, would have a stronger case than someone arguing solely against the COVID-19 vaccine.

Most reasons given as part of requests for religious exemptions are not religious at all; instead, they are political or debates about science.

“For purely religious purposes, it’s very difficult to prove that,” Kane said. “Because of the need for the common good, the Catholic health system is saying, ‘You need to have a vaccine. It’s something you need for the people you serve. You’re putting people at risk if you don’t have it.’ ”

Kane acknowledged that a small group of bishops is objecting to the COVID-19 vaccines based on the probability that the cell lines from which they were created were associated with abortions in the 1960s and 1970s. No vaccines, including the current COVID-19 vaccines, contain fetal cells, however, he said.