The number of parents who opted out of school-required vaccines for their children because of non-medical reasons, such as religious or philosophical beliefs, increased between 2005 and 2011, according to U.S. researchers.
During this period, the rates of non-medical exemptions were higher in the states with easy opt-out policies, such as California and Maryland, and in those states that allowed philosophical, instead of only religious, exemptions.
“The more relaxed these requirements are, as we and others have shown, the easier it is to get an exemption, the higher the rates of exemptions,” said Saad Omer, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Emory University in Atlanta, and lead study author.
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