Vaccine opt- out comes to head in Sacramento
SACRAMENTO — A bill that would eliminate the option California parents use to skip their child’s school immunizations faces a do- or- die test Wednesday in a state Senate committee that came close to rejecting it last week.
Parents who accused legislators of seeking to bar their unvaccinated children from public and private schools descended last week on the Education Committee, which put off a vote that would almost certainly have killed the bill. Its authors have made two amend-
ments in an effort to win committee support, one that would allow unvaccinated children to be home- schooled with other children, and the other to let independent study students — who do most of their work at home — skip required vaccinations.
One sticking point that Sens. Richard Pan, D- Sacramento, and Ben Allen, D- Santa Monica, have not changed is the bill’s lack of an exemption for people who claim religious reasons for not giving their children vaccinations for such once- common diseases as mumps, measles and rubella. The senators said they were open to such an exemption, but feared that including it would defeat their goal of driving up immunization rates to protect the public.
Religious exemptions, allowed in 46 states, are sometimes used by parents whose objections to vaccines are largely based on health- related fears. There’s even a website that tells parents how to legally claim a religious exemption even if they’re not religious.
“The concern we’d have to look at is, are you going to have people try to evade it, and therefore we are in a situation where they won’t be truthful and we aren’t able to get immunization rates up?” asked Pan, who is a pediatrician. “We are open to discussions about religion exemptions, but at this point we have to see what people want to suggest along those lines.”
Under current California law, parents who don’t want their children immunized, as otherwise required to attend school, simply cite “personal belief” to opt out, after obtaining a health care provider’s signature as proof that they received information about immunizations. If the personal belief is due to religion, parents do not need a doctor’s signature.
Pan’s and Allen’s bill, SB277, would eliminate the personalbelief exemption but still allow children to be exempt from school immunizations for medical reasons.
High immunization rates
Public health officials say immunization rates need to be high — at least 90 percent of the population — to prevent the spread of diseases and protect people who can’t receive vaccines because of age or illness.
Parents filed 13,592 personalbelief exceptions this school year for California kindergartners, or 2.5 percent of the total kindergarten population, according to the California Department of Public Health. Some children were given conditional entry when a vaccine was not due yet, making the total vaccination rate 90.4 percent of the 535,332 students enrolled in kindergartens across the state.
SB277 sailed through the Senate’s Health Committee, but stalled last week in the Education Committee amid concerns that unvaccinated children would be denied the education guaranteed them by the California Constitution if they were barred from schools. It faces another committee hearing Wednesday that could determine its fate.
The bill was introduced in response to a multistate measles outbreak beginning in December that was traced to an unvaccinated child who exposed other people at Disneyland. Many children who became ill were not fully vaccinated, leading to the largest outbreak in more than two decades. The state public health department said Friday that the measles outbreak was officially over.
“We have to worry about the next one,” Pan said. “The goal of the bill is to get our immunization rates high enough so people don’t have to worry about themselves and their children getting preventable diseases.”
Pan sponsored last year’s law requiring parents to get a health care provider’s signature before obtaining a personal- belief exemption. The law took effect in January, and personal- belief exemptions decreased nearly 20 percent.
The success of the law has been cited by opponents of the senator’s latest vaccine bill.
Opponents’ argument
“This bill is not necessary,” said Jean Keese, spokeswoman for the California Coalition for Health Choice, a statewide group opposed to SB277. “California vaccination rates are rising and personal- belief exemptions are going down. There is no crisis.”
Mississippi and West Virginia are the only states that do not grant personal or religious exemptions, instead allowing only a medical professional to approve an exemption for a child. In Mississippi, the immunization rate for children entering kindergarten is 97.5 percent, said Dr. Thomas Dobbs, the state epidemiologist with the Mississippi Department of Health.
“We are proud in Mississippi to have a strong immunization law,” Dobbs said. “We’ve been this way a long time. There are a small number of individuals who aren’t pleased with it, but it’s a small minority. We’ve had really good buy- in. We know immunizations are safe, and we know they have been extremely effective in saving lives.”
Dobbs said he has watched as other states try to tighten their restrictions on religious and personal belief exemptions, while Mississippi has had to fight off attempts to add them. The latest legislative efforts to add a philosophical exemption to Mississippi’s vaccine laws were thwarted this year.
“Most states have religious exemptions, and some are more restrictive than others,” Dobbs said. “If it’s like checking a box, that’s not really rigorous.”