Ripon mom fights vaccination requirement

The halls of our state’s Capitol were crowded with hundreds of parents and children recently, drawn from around California to oppose Senate Bill 277 – a law that would deny access to schools for families who are missing one or all of a mandated list of vaccinations.

I was among those families uniting to fight for our children’s right to an education and the parents’ right to make informed decisions with physicians regarding their children’s health care. We included Republicans and Democrats, nurses, educators, engineers, doctors, small-business owners, stay-at-home parents, children with special needs and fully vaccinated, healthy little ones. We might have included some of your friends, neighbors and co-workers.

We were there because California legislators are on the cusp of eliminating a fundamental parental right to choose what medical interventions a child must have, based on a panic over the Disneyland measles outbreak. By eliminating the personal belief exemption, the Legislature is poised to ban partially vaccinated and unvaccinated children from schools – though not one of the 24 school-age children who contracted measles this winter was infected at school. We were there to remind legislators that according to California’s own Department of Public Health report in August 2014, “Vaccination coverage in California is at or near all-time highs.”

Only 2.5 percent of California kindergartners currently file a personal belief exemption, and many of these students are mostly or partially vaccinated. California legislators want to do something politically popular: stop measles. Blaming the small fraction of people with exemptions for outbreaks will not achieve that goal. It will, however, deny access to education for these families who cannot comply with SB277 for deeply felt religious or personal beliefs.

Here are some facts about California’s vaccination rates:

▪ Current law is already increasing vaccination rates. Assembly Bill 2109, passed last year, resulted in a 19 percent decrease in exemptions in just one year, according to the California Department of Public Health.

▪ According to the California Department of Public Health, California is above the threshold for herd immunity for measles, whooping cough and polio.

▪ SB 277 would not prevent another Disneyland-like measles outbreak, which started at a tourist destination, not a school. There were no transmissions of measles in a school. Had SB 277 been in effect last year, it is unlikely anything about the Disneyland outbreak would be different.

▪ Children with HIV, AIDS and hepatitis B are allowed to attend schools, but children who don’t have a hepatitis B vaccination – for a disease unlikely to be transmitted in a school setting – are not.

▪ Most “pockets” of exemptions occur in sparsely populated counties where a few exemption holders skew percentages. Of the 21 counties that hold the greatest percentage of exemptions, this equates to an average of one to two exemptions per school, with a worst-case scenario of seven to eight at a school (in Nevada County).

▪ In the latest measles outbreak, a county’s exemption rate did not correlate to the number of measles cases. Merced County’s exemption rate is only 0.98 percent, and it had one measles case. Marin County’s exemption rate is 6.45 percent, and it had two measles cases. Los Angeles County’s exemption rate is only 1.62 percent and it had 28 cases.

▪ SB 277 offers no option for families who hold religious objections to vaccination, including some Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Christian Scientists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Fetal cell lines are heavily used in vaccines, and two of the commonly used fetal cells lines, WI-38 (lung cells from an aborted female baby) and MRC-5 (lung cells from an aborted male baby), are found in chickenpox and hepatitis B vaccines – all of which are mandated by SB 277.

California can continue to increase already good vaccination rates without coercion by providing free and low-cost vaccination clinics, education and outreach.

This story was originally published June 16, 2015 at 1:49 PM with the headline "Ripon mom fights vaccination requirement."