See vaccination, antivaccinationist Of the religions normally encountered in the West only the Christian Scientists and the Dutch Orthodox Reformed church (about 2% of the population of the Netherlands) do not support vaccination and other immunisations in 2006.

Religions with dietary prohibitions and which regard particular animals as unclean make exceptions for medical treatment ^*," target="_blank" >http://ganfyd.org/upload/1/11/Porcine_gelatine_medications_Islam_WHO_2003.doc, [http://ganfyd.org/index.php?title=Jehovahs_Witnesses.

In Hinduism the goddess Sitala both causes and cures high fever, rashes, hot flashes and pustules. All of these are symptoms of smallpox and the goddess is thought to have been described following an epidemic in 400. See Smallpox.

Timothy Dwight IV, a Congregationalist minister and Yale university president, held that vaccination thwarted God's will, saying^*:

''If God had decreed from all eternity that a certain person should die of smallpox, it would be a frightful sin to avoid and annul that decree by the trick of vaccination.

Several Boston clergymen and devout physicians, believing that "the law of God prohibits the practice," formed the Anti-vaccination Society in 1798, only two years after Jenner's publication of Smallpox vaccination. Some others complained that the practice was unnatural and dangerous, going so far as to demand that doctors that carried out these procedures be tried for attempted murder.^*

Religious organisations, even very early on, were generally not against techniques of resisting disease. In modern times the Vatican Curia has considered the status of the Rubella vaccine's embryonic cell origin and concluded that Catholics should use another vaccine when one becomes available, but that it is better to use the existing one than not at allMORAL REFLECTIONS ON VACCINES PREPARED FROM CELLS DERIVED FROM ABORTED HUMAN FOETUSES, a Vatican document published in Medicina e Morale, a journal published by the Center for Bioethics of the Catholic University in Rome. .

Recently the approval of the Gardasil vaccine against the Sexually transmitted disease Human papilloma virus has caused several conservative moral organizations such as the Family Research Council to oppose mandatory vaccination on moral grounds. They believe that the possibility of disease serves as a deterrent against risky sexual contact, and that removing the possibility of disease would have the unintended side effect of encouraging risky sexual contact, particularly among teenagers. ^*

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