Vaccine law decried by some on North Coast, applauded by others Vaccine law decried by some on North Coast, applauded by others
Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday signed controversial legislation to impose one of the strictest school vaccination laws in the country, eliminating an exemption that hundreds of Sonoma County parents have used to forgo childhood vaccinations for their children based on philosophical beliefs.
The new law, which takes effect July 1 next year, will require students attending all public and private schools, day-care centers and similar institutions to be immunized against 10 specified communicable diseases unless they’ve obtained a medical exemption.
Opponents already are vowing to challenge the legislation in court, saying it improperly usurps the right of parents to choose what’s right for their children - a view held by many in the North Bay, which has some of the state’s highest refusal rates for childhood vaccination.
“We’re not going to give up,” said Debra Baretta, a Petaluma mother of three, who traveled to Sacramento on Tuesday to join a silent vigil opposing the new bill. “This bill is unconstitutional. It doesn’t allow (certain) children the right to a public education.”
Her children, 13, 14 and 15, will essentially be grandfathered under an earlier vaccine law and will likely not have to be vaccinated. But the law has still prompted Baretta to consider taking her kids out of public school next year in protest.
“I’m fighting because this is wrong,” she said. “We should always have informed choice and consent when our children are having a medical procedure.”
The law’s approval, however, has been hailed by the public health community as well as families whose immune-compromised children are put at greater risk of infection by those who choose not to vaccinate.
Windsor mother Cindy Schalich, whose 19-year-old son, Ryder, has a neurological disease for which the treatment lowers his resistance to disease, said she’s continually concerned that living in an area with a disproportionate number of unvaccinated people puts him at risk.
“When we’re in this population, with unvaccinated folks, he’s exposed to more potential things that can just take him down,” she said.
Passed in its final form by the state Senate on Monday and signed by Brown on Tuesday morning, SB277 means parents will no longer be able to enroll their children in school or day care without a suite of childhood shots against contagious diseases such as mumps, measles, pertussis, rubella, polio and chicken pox. Medical exemptions would still be granted to children with serious health issues. The law does not apply to home-schooled children or those in independent study.
Children already in school, depending on their grade, may be spared from having to undergo vaccinations for some years yet, as the law requires a check of inoculation records only as students advance from one “grade span” to another, defined as birth to preschool, kindergarten to sixth grade, and seventh to 12th grade.
Thus, students already in primary grades won’t be required to catch up on their vaccinations until they enter seventh grade, said a spokesman for the California Department of Public Health.
And students entering kindergarten this fall can still obtain personal belief exemptions as long as their paperwork is filed by Jan. 1 next year.
“This bill takes the long view of ‘How do we get people vaccinated in California and prevent diseases from spreading?’?” Sonoma County Health Officer Karen Milman said, “and if that takes a couple of years to roll in, it’s still better than our current circumstance.”
Introduced by state Sens. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, and Ben Allen, D-Santa Monica, and supported by all of the North Coast’s legislators, the bill arose from a recent resurgence of pertussis, also known and whooping cough, and, especially, an outbreak of measles traced to Disneyland that sickened 131 people in California between December and April of this year, according to the state Department of Public Health.
At the same time, use of the personal belief exemption first made available in 1961 has been on the rise, leaving many schools without the vaccination rates needed to protect the general population against diseases like measles, a concept known as “herd immunity.”
“The science is clear that vaccines dramatically protect children against a number of infectious and dangerous diseases,” Brown said in his signing message. “While it’s true that no medical intervention is without risk, the evidence shows that immunization powerfully benefits and protects the community.”
Until now, only Mississippi and West Virginia required all students without medical exemptions to obtain vaccinations. All other states have religious belief exemptions, while 20 have philosophical or personal belief exemptions, as well, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
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