By Rachel Marie Stone April 13 at 9:46 AM

(Bigstock)

Dr. Paul Offit was pretty sure that religion was harmful to children.

But while writing his newest book on medicine, the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine was surprised by Jesus.

Offit says he always had moderate respect for religion but started to doubt when, as a young attending physician, he saw five children die within 10 days during an outbreak of measles in Philadelphia in 1991. At the center of the epidemic were children who were unvaccinated in accordance with their parents radical brand of Christian belief.

A professor of pediatrics and vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania, Offit has been branded as Dr. Proffit by anti-vaccination activists. In previous books, he has defended vaccinations, challenged the now widely discredited autism-vaccine link and sharply criticized the alternative medicine industry. When he published Autisms False Prophets in 2008, he didnt go on book tour because had received death threats.

[How the U.S. went from eliminating measles to a measles outbreak at Disneyland]

Having seen children die because of their parents religiously-motivated neglect including the use of religious exemptions to vaccination, Offit began to read and to appreciate new atheist writings, including books by Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. As he began writing his new book, Bad Faith: How Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine, he assumed that he would arrive at similar conclusions: that religion was too often the culprit in preventable deaths, and that it was best left behind.

Bad Faith is full of stories of needless deaths: the children of Jehovahs Witnesses dying for lack of a blood transfusion, the children of Christian Science believers dying for lack of antibiotic treatment and the infants of ultra-Orthodox Jews dying or suffering brain damage after being infected with herpes from unsanitary ritual circumcision.

Most states allow religious exemptions to vaccines and permit parents to claim a religious defense if their child dies from a treatable disease.

Continue reading here:

What one of the anti-vaccination movements least favorite doctors discovered about Jesus