Prayer Isn’t A Public Health Strategy

The Department of Labor, the Department of Defense, and the White House all recently shared an image of George Washington praying in the snow. The 1975 painting, “The Prayer at Valley Forge,” is a favorite of white Christian Nationalists. But it didn’t happen. Even the Museum of the Bible, where the artwork hangs, acknowledges it depicts an “imagined moment.”

A couple things Washington actually did that this administration refuses to acknowledge? Enslave people and help lay the foundations of American public health. 

Washington watched smallpox, diphtheria, and scarlet fever devastate his troops. At a time when little was known about viruses or their transmission, and immunization was risky, Washington was one of the first Americans to propose compulsory quarantine and mass inoculation. He understood protecting public health required collective action, and nearly the entire Continental Army was eventually inoculated. 

This is the very same, complicated figure who wrote: 

“…no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution — For you, doubtless, remember that I have often expressed my sentiment that every man, conducting himself as a good citizen, and being accountable to God alone for his religious opinions, ought to be protected in worshiping the Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience.” 

Washington was all of these things: an enslaver, a deep believer in religious liberty, and an early advocate for public health policies. He saw firsthand that prayer was not an effective strategy to combat infectious disease. Today’s leaders have the benefit of two centuries of scientific advancement and still, somehow, manage to know less. 

On Thursday, the Trump Administration formally withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization (WHO). In a statement, the Department of Health & Human Services claimed our nation remained “the world’s leading force in protecting public health, saving lives, and responding rapidly to infectious disease outbreaks.”  

That rings a little hollow given that two days prior the U.S. officially reached 12 months of consistent measles transmission, placing us on the brink of losing the elimination status we achieved in 2000. 

When asked about it, a newly installed top official with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Ralph Abraham, was wholly unconcerned. Abraham, the former Louisiana Surgeon General who opposes mass vaccination and is not a board-certified physician, dismissed the loss of elimination status as an insignificant “cost of doing business.” He said, “We have these communities that choose to be unvaccinated. That’s their personal freedom.” 

Also this week, the chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) openly questioned the need for polio and measles vaccines on a podcast, where he also admitted he doesn’t “like established science” and explained, “What we are doing is returning individual autonomy to the first order — not public health.” 

You heard that right: Public health isn’t the priority. Which does help explain why, earlier this month, the federal government revised its guidelines for childhood immunizations — reducing the number of recommended vaccines (citing Denmark as a model, a nation that reported three cases of measles in 2024); emphasizing “shared clinical decision-making” (for infants, not women); “reinforcing” religious exemptions (including “deeply held beliefs about the sanctity of life”); and promising to fund Tuskegee-like studies to “determine the health effects” of already rigorously studied vaccines. 

The consequences of this regime’s wrongness are significant:

• Over the past year, measles outbreaks across the U.S. surged to the highest and deadliest levels since 1991.
• The vast majority of confirmed cases, including two deaths, were among unvaccinated children. During the 2024-25 school year, nearly 300,0000 kindergarteners hadn’t completed the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine series.
• National coverage fell to 92.5%, marking the fifth consecutive year below the 95% threshold required for herd immunity.
• 45 states now allow religious exemptions; another 15 allow personal or philosophical exemptions; and in 17, more than 5% of kindergarteners are exempt from vaccination requirements. 

This dangerous decline is a direct result of misinformation, disinformation, and the expansion of religious vaccine exemptions— despite clear evidence of their abject failure and the success in states that have eliminated non-medical exemptions.

Measles is highly contagious, but it is also easily preventable. The standard protocol of two doses of the MMR vaccine is safe and provides 97% protection. And for those who care more about “doing business” than saving lives, it’s also far cheaper than recent outbreaks — estimated to cost the public between $36,000,000 and $96,000,000.

Our nation’s health policies must be guided by science, not superstition. One does not simply opt out of public health. As Washington himself emphasized, religious liberty belongs to those “conducting himself as a good citizen.” Our individual rights are paired with collective responsibilities, and one person’s religious beliefs must never override another person’s well-being. 

Religious freedom protects our right to believe and not believe, but it does not confer a license to endanger, cause harm to, or violate the rights of others. Church-state separation exists precisely to ensure that evidence — not dogma — governs the policy decisions that affect us all. 

When governments treat vaccine rejection as a harmless expression of individual autonomy, they abdicate their responsibility to protect public health. The cost of their callous disregard for science is borne by all of us and especially the most vulnerable: children, the immunocompromised, and those who are unable to receive immunizations for legitimate medical reasons.

We’re only a few weeks into the 2026 legislative session, and our Policy Team is already monitoring over 1,000 bills, including 20+ that, if passed, will create even more religious exemptions. To see what vaccine policies are being proposed in your state, click here. And to support our Policy Team’s critical advocacy work, please donate today.

In solidarity,

Melina Cohen
Director of Strategic Communications & Policy Engagement