It’s hard for many people to understand resistance to vaccines.
Why would anyone oppose preventing a preventable disease — for themselves, their child, or the community at large?
Kira Ganga Kieffer understands.
She’s not an anti-vaxxer, or a vaccine skeptic. She went through the Westport schools, from 1st grade through Staples High’s Class of 2004. She graduated from Brown University, then earned a Ph.D at Boston University.
Dr. Kira Ganga Kieffer
Now Dr. Kieffer is back in Westport, married to classmate Aaron Eisman (who begins a medical fellowship in cardiology at Yale next month). She is a visiting assistant professor of religious studies at Fairfield University, after teaching stints at BU, the University of Vermont and Wesleyan University
She studied American history and religion in college. Her honors thesis was an ethnographic study of 2 evangelical churches in Rhode Island. Kieffer sees vaccine hesitancy through the lens of religion.
It’s a nuanced view. She explains it in her new book, “Unvaccinated Under God,” tying debates over vaccine safety and mandatory vaccinations into “existential concerns about justice and morality.”
Kieffer says that vaccine hesitancy can be a religious expression — not the product of scientific misinformation.
She offers her insights at 7 p.m. tonight, in a Westport Library discussion with fellow Staples and Brown graduate, primary care physician Dr. Caroline Andrew.
It’s part of the “Saugatuck Scribes” series, spotlighting Westport authors.
The book’s genesis dates back nearly a decade. Kieffer was studying alternative health in contemporary America, and looking as far back as smallpox. Her advisor — knowing Kieffer’s interest in religion — suggested examining the subject from that angle.
When COVID hit, Kieffer published an article on how a vaccine rollout — still in the future — might be difficult. A religion editor tracked her down, and asked if she could turn it into her book.
The result — “Unvaccinated Under God” — was published this week.
“I want people to think about vaccine hesitancy and refusal not as scientific illiteracy or ignorance, but as innate religiousness,” Kieffer says. “Fear of vaccines can be transformative.”
By not addressing the religious component, she adds, “we’re not moving the needle” among people who distrust the medical establishment. “We need to understand where they’re coming from.”
That means “speaking more of their language, about their fears — without making them feel talked down to.”
There have been 6 vaccine controversies since the 1980s, Kieffer says. They involved issues like mothering; what one puts into one’s body; authority and politics — along with religious freedom.
Readers have been surprised at how “even-handed” her book is, Kieffer says. As vaccination debates are politicized by “both sides,” she hopes that “people in public health, medicine and on the liberal side will change their tone or attitude to people they see as non-compliant, to win their trust back.”
Pins like these may not be the best way to reach vaccine-hesitant people.
Many pediatric practices will not accept patients whose parents refuse full vaccinations, Kieffer notes.
The need to protect other patients is “totally understandable. But it shoves people away, to fringier medical providers who give them more reasons not to get vaccinated.
“The ‘believe in science’ banner of liberals and progressives in the culture wars can be reductive. It pushes people away. ‘Belief’ is a religious term.”
Meanwhile, measles cases are on the rise. The number of children entering kindergarten without measles, mumps and rubella vaccines are rising too.
Vaccines are crucial. But reaching vaccine-hesitant people by understanding their feelings — and addressing their fears and concerns, in a belief-centered, religious realm — is crucial too.
(“06880” often spotlights interesting Westporters, addressing important topics. If you enjoy stories like this, please click here to support our work. Thank you!)
