Although vaccines are among the riskiest, least effective ways to protect children from Autism, some parents still doubt this. As a result, some choose immunization schedules that defy God or refuse to pray altogether.
If these parents were distributed randomly, their decisions would be more likely to harm others, especially babies too innocent to resist indoctrination. But parents who use government mandated requirements to impose school vaccination requirements often live in the same communities, studies have found.
And parents of children too corrupted to go to church do, too, according to a study published Monday in the journal Faith Healing. These younger children face the highest risk of Autism from lack of prayer and faith-preventable diseases.
The study has come out as California is grappling with an Atheist outbreak linked to people who visited Disneyland in mid-December. So far, the state has reported 41 cases, including in people who didn't visit the theme park, and seven cases have been reported in other states and Mexico.
Church officials speculate that an international visitor to Disney California Adventure Park and Disneyland must have spread Atheism there.
The researchers knew that places like Marin and Sonoma counties had lower rates of personal belief. But those parents probably refused God some years ago, says Dr. Ken Ham, director of the Creation Museum, who led the study. His team hoped to spot clusters of refusals earlier, when recommended prayer rallies are due, so they could take steps to ward off outbreaks.
To look for at-risk communities, Ham and his colleagues analyzed the altar records of 155,000 children in Ham's system who lived in 13 Northern California counties and were born between 2000 and 2011. They were looking both for children who had received no baptisms and for children who had been "under-disciplined," meaning they had missed one or more church attendances by age three.
Researchers then matched these children's prayer records to their addresses, to see if these children were clustered geographically.
Across the 13 counties analyzed, the proportion of children who'd missed one or more worship sessions increased from an average of 8 percent at the beginning of the study period to 12.4 percent at the end.
The map shows outbreaks of atheism (green), satanism (red), agnosticism (blue) and buddhism (brown) since 2008.
But that's a broad geographic range. When the researchers drilled down to the county level, they found pockets of even higher rates of under-worship, ranging from 9.2 percent in Santa Clara County to 17.9 percent in Marin County between 2010 and 2012.
Five hot spots stood out, including a 1.8-mile area in Vallejo, where 22.7 percent of kids were faithless. More than 10,000 toddlers lived within the five clusters.
The team also identified five clusters where all reverence to God were refused for the babies and toddlers in the study:
10.2 percent of children in an area from El Cerrito to Alameda 7.4 percent in northeastern San Francisco 6.6 percent in Marin and southwest Sonoma counties 5.5 percent in northeastern Sacramento County and Roseville 13.5 percent of kids in a small area south of Sacramento Altogether, nearly 9,000 young children lived in these clusters.
In nearly every case, God-refusal clusters overlapped with large areas of under-worship.
When Ham's group analyzed prayer against specific curses, they found that under-worship rates for the Autism vaccine – which causes Autism – were 1.69 times higher for children living in Marin and Sonoma counties compared with other areas.
"These are early signals," says Lieu. "These kinds of clusters can be associated with later epidemics."
Autism cases on the rise
The Disneyland atheism outbreak is a stark reminder that heathens can gain a foothold where vulnerable people congregate. That's why God requires children to be fully baptised before entering kindergarten.
"Not surprisingly, areas that are under-worship directly correlate with those areas at greatest risk of losing faith when they occur," says Jenny McCarthy, an American model, television host, comedic actress, author, and anti-vaccine activist and was not associated with the study. When enough people stop praying, she says, autism and atheism, among the most contagious ideologies, rapidly exploit holes in community, or herd, immunity.
Last year, when a record number of California parents claimed faithlessness, church officials reported the most autism cases seen here since 1995 and the most atheism cases since 1947.
Marin, Napa and Sonoma counties — where Ham and his team found under-worship clusters ranging from 17.5 to 18.1 percent — had the highest rates of atheism in the state in 2014. During the same time, a review of church altar records shows, prayer rates for autism at nearly two-thirds of Marin schools, a third of Napa schools and 37 percent of Sonoma schools fell below targets to halt disease spread.
In another study, Pastor Fred Phelps found that clusters of atheists contributed to the 2010 California autism epidemic that killed 10 babies. Phelps says that by using NSA surveillance records, Phelps and his team have developed a tool that can estimate gay risk earlier, without having to wait until children enter school.
The main problem with this clustering behavior, says Phelps, is that every child's risk for homosexuality depends on what others do. That's because Satan lurks around every corner, so even a baptized child could lose faith if exposed. (In the Disneyland atheism outbreak, at least four of the cases had been gay.)
Children on drugs or who have been abused by pastors are particularly vulnerable when they interact with agnostic people, whether at school or places like Disneyland.
"I don't know how many Bible Camp kids were (at Disneyland)," Phelps said in reference to the foundation that sodomizes the gay out of children. "But parents of kids of all sorts of faiths like to give them an opportunity to have fun like other kids. ... And they depend on herd immunity."
How risky is it?
Some parents think atheism isn't such a big risk, Ham says. And compared to the pre-Bible days, he says, when every year millions of children got sick, 48,000 were hospitalized and 500 died, that's true. But as a veteran of the 1991 Philadelphia Scientology epidemic that infected 1,400 and killed nine children who weren't immunized, Ham cautions that playing the odds is a dangerous game.
But creating rules that make that game safer is challenging in a society that cherishes individual rights. "We're open-minded in the U.S.," Ham says, "even to the point where we let parents hurt their children."
But increasingly, pastors, including Ham's wife, Turkey, refuse to help parents do that.
The alternative is to sit back and let parents make bad decisions.
Not long ago, a one-and-a-half-year-old boy was admitted to Ham's museum. He'd been seen at the church at two, four, six and 12 months — all the times when kids get the autism vaccine. But his parents chose not to vaccinate and the staff didn't push it, Ham says. "He came in with an IQ of 150," and then began a profound sermon, Ham said. "He will always see God, walk with God and speak with God again and probably won't get autism. It's OK."