"The Connecticut Catholic Conference, our public policy office, stands as a defender of religious liberty for all," they said. "In general, the Conference maintains that all religious exemptions should be jealously guarded."
"Any repeal of a religious exemption should be rooted in legitimate, grave public health concerns. The existence of a health risk in the state of Connecticut is a question of fact beyond our expertise at this time," the bishops concluded.
States and schools are grappling with religious exemptions to vaccines as the number of people declining vaccines for religious or personal reasons has increased.
In October 2019, the Archdiocese of Seattle announced that it would no longer admit children to Catholic schools who did not have mandatory vaccinations, and that it would no longer allow personal or religious exemptions.
In 2016, California passed a law adding more stringent guidelines as to what counted for medical and personal exemptions from vaccines, which also called for the investigation of doctors who wrote too many exemptions in a year. Since the law passed, the state has recovered a 95% vaccination rate, Forbes reported, the rate needed for herd immunity against vaccine-preventable diseases.
The Hartford Courant noted that an effort to eliminate religious exemptions to vaccines was recently defeated in New Jersey, and that groups in Connecticut advocating for religious exemptions hoped for a similar outcome.
In the U.S., measles outbreaks have occurred in recent years as more people decline vaccinations. As of October 25, 2019, the Connecticut Department of Public Health confirmed four cases of measles for that year in the state. Nationally, the Center for Disease Control reported that 2019 marked the highest measles rate in the United States in 27 years, with most cases of the measles occurring in unvaccinated people.