**6. Conclusions**

I have argued that knowledge and justified beliefs as established in this paper's ethicoepistemic argument give significant and necessary consideration to both empirically-verified facts about the world as well as to moral judgments regarding decisions about what constitutes a just policy for vaccination exemptions. I have also argued that some specific medical exemptions—and the general approach to justifying medical exemptions—are morally justified because they have at least *prima facie* evidence-based reasons and competent voices behind them. Though this does not guarantee the prevention of human and methodological error—nor its reputational fallout—it does offer the best-available means of assessing a fair way of determining vaccine exemptions. At the same time, I have argued that two forms of belief justification typical of religious reasoning, namely, belief in the divine and canonical based beliefs as well as identity-constituting beliefs, fall short with respect to empirical and

justifiable evidence offered in support of their claims and therefore fail the test of attaining acceptable justifications for belief.

On first blush, there appears to be greater promise for vaccination acceptance in the identity-forming groups for at least two reasons. First, within such groups, there are people who appear to personally desire vaccination, but hesitate because of fear of social fallout. In such cases, their lesser reasons (desire to avoid negative group pressure) arguably override their better reasons (judgements about the efficacy of vaccination). Among such individuals, it might only take a nudge to change their avoidance posture to one of acceptance, although what that nudge must be is as of yet unclear. Second, there are instances in which religious believers who are prominent and do vaccinate have a motivational effect on vaccine hesitant religious adherents, as illustrated by the persuasive power that US National Institute for Health Director Francis Collins—a well-regarded evangelical Christian—has had on these debates in various evangelical churches (Chu et al. 2021; Bokemper et al. 2021).

Though it might be tempting to allow public health policy to accommodate the arguments of various contrarian religious thinkers and individuals by incorporating their choices into policy, this strategy ultimately does a disservice to the larger society. Some probably most—humans embrace religious beliefs at some level. Some will refuse vaccines for the reasons explored in this paper. But it is not the obligation of the secular society, the scientific community, and the public health agents to whom we have entrusted our public health to embrace unjustified, unverified, even harmful consequences of beliefs without significant empirical and reasonable evidence to the contrary. To do so invites an arbitrariness and a posture that in the end is arguably unethical in its failure to advance the interests of others.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** No data available.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

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