Republican Rep. Kathy Edmonston of Louisiana believes no one should be required to vaccinate their children. That’s why she wants schools to be proactive in telling parents that it is their right under Louisiana law to request a waiver.
“It’s not the vaccine itself, it’s the mandate,” Edmonston told Stateline. “The law is the law. And it already says you can unsubscribe if you don’t want to. If you want it, you can go anywhere and get it.”
Although Louisiana is one of the bottom states the most health indicators, almost 90% of kindergarten students across the state have complete immunization records, according to data from the Louisiana Department of Health from last school year. That’s true even if Louisiana maintains some of them the most extensive exceptions for personal, religious and moral reasons. The state only requires written notification from parents to schools.
Edmonston sponsored legislation To do this, schools would have to inform parents about the exceptions. The bill is intended to ensure that parents are not withheld medically necessary information, she said.
Vaccinations not only protect the patient, but also those around them. Science has shown that a population can achieve Community immunity, also known as herd immunity, once a certain percentage of the group is vaccinated. This herd immunity can protect people who cannot be vaccinated, such as those with weakened immune systems or severe allergies, by reducing their risk of infection. However, in recent years, COVID-19 vaccines have spooked some people who oppose compulsory vaccination, even though research shows the vaccines are far safer than contracting the disease.
Some lawmakers across the country are working to circumvent vaccination requirements, not just against COVID-19, but also against measles, polio and meningitis. Public health experts fear renewed resistance to childhood vaccinations will reverse federal progress in vaccination rates. Meanwhile, cases of some diseases, including measles, have increased across the country.
We are against the government telling us what to do with our own bodies.
– Louisiana Republican State Rep. Kathy Edmonston
Edmonston’s bill is one of dozens this session aimed at easing vaccination requirements, according to a government-maintained database National Conference of State Legislatures, a nonpartisan research organization serving lawmakers and their staff. Most bills either failed in committee or did not advance, but some became law.
Idaho enacted a Law, which takes effect in July and allows students “of legal age” — 18 in Idaho — to submit their own vaccine exemptions to schools and universities, both public and private. And Tennessee passed one LawThe law, which took effect in April, prohibits the state from requiring vaccinations as a condition of adoption or foster care if the family adopting a child has religious or moral objections to vaccinations.
“Conservatives have really moved toward the position of medical freedom, where people really need to be educated about the vaccine that they’re taking,” said Tennessee state Sen. Bo Watson, who sponsored his state’s legislation.
“I think the public health community has really lost credibility during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Watson, a Republican. “And they have to work really hard to restore some of that credibility.”
Other bills that would have allowed some exemptions were passed by state legislatures but stopped by governors.
In West Virginia, Republican Gov. Jim Justice vetoed the bill legislation This would have allowed full-time students in virtual public schools, as well as private and parochial schools, to avoid mandatory vaccination requirements. The judge said in his veto message that he had “heard consistent, strong opposition to this legislation from our state’s medical community.”
The Democratic Governor of Wisconsin, Tony Evers, also vetoed the measure legislation This would have resulted in public colleges and universities having to allow vaccination waiver for health, religious or personal reasons.
Edmonston said she has already tried her legislation in Louisiana; it either died or was vetoed by former Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards. But now that Republican Gov. Jeff Landry is in charge, Edmonston is confident the bill will become law. It has already been passed by the House of Representatives and is being debated in the Senate.
Both she and Watson said the push to relax requirements or create broader exemptions for vaccinations has nothing to do with the vaccines themselves. The debate tends to focus on what many conservatives call “over-engineering government.”
“We are against the government telling us what to do with our own bodies,” Edmonston said.
Greater momentum after COVID-19
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends numerous vaccinations for infants Standard treatment. And attending K-12 schools typically requires vaccinations that protect against measles, mumps and rubella, chickenpox and hepatitis B, among other things. States determine theirs Own requirements However, there are exceptions and deviations.
Opposition to vaccination mandates dates back more than a century to the early 1900s, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court in 1905 governed States could require parents to vaccinate their children, according to Simon Haeder, an associate professor of public health at Texas A&M University who has tracked vaccine skepticism for several years.
Although the opposition is mostly partisan, with Republicans more likely to support vaccine exemptions, Haeder pointed out that far-left groups — who may be more skeptical of drugs in general — also support relaxing vaccine regulations.
“Scientific skepticism and resistance to government intervention and the partisan nature of this issue have really increased since the COVID years,” Haeder told Stateline.
“It’s very difficult right now for states to increase vaccination requirements,” he said.
According to the CDC, the national vaccination rate for kindergarten students fell from about 95% for all vaccinations in the 2019-2020 school year to about 93% for all vaccinations in the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 school years.
Nonmedical exemptions account for more than 90% of all approved vaccine exemptions and are permitted in all but five states. Exemptions increased from 2.2% among kindergarten students in the 2019-2020 school year to 3% in 2022-2023, and 10 states reported that more than 5% of kindergarten students were exempt from at least one vaccination.
Jennifer Herricks, a microbiologist and founder of Louisiana Families for Vaccines, a vaccine advocacy group, has been following efforts to loosen vaccine regulations since 2015.
“I became a mother. And then it became even more personal for me, especially with the little infants who are too young to get a lot of vaccinations,” Herricks said. “And then you realize that they are susceptible to these diseases and that they rely on the people around them to be vaccinated so that they don’t get sick.”
But Jill Hines, co-director of Health Freedom Louisiana, a group that opposes vaccine mandates, said some parents just want the option to opt out.
“Believe it or not, my children are fully vaccinated. We were never informed of the state’s emergency law,” Hines told Stateline. She added that some in her group believe the vaccine reporting requirement is an invasion of privacy.
“We should not be denied access to society, to a job, to education just because we refused medical procedures,” she said.
Growing concern among health professionals
Mississippi, which ranks near the bottom of states in most health indicators such as obesity and heart disease, has not had a case of measles since 1992.
“We have reduced all potentially fatal childhood infections in Mississippi from commonplace to extremely rare,” said Dr. Daniel Edney, the state health official, in an interview.
Vaccinations against childhood diseases were carried out required by law since 1979 for entry into K-12 schools and daycare centers. The mandate has helped Mississippi lead the nation some of the highest rates of childhood vaccinations, including a vaccination rate of almost 99% among kindergarten children.
But last year a federal judge ordered Mississippi to begin They accepted religious exemptions after an advocacy group, the Texas-based Informed Consent Action Network, sued the state in federal court. Since then, thousands of exemption requests have been received.
Mississippi is close to approving more than 2,800 religious exemptions, Edney said. He expects there will be more exemptions in other states as lawmakers elsewhere have success in loosening vaccination requirements or increasing opt-out information requirements.
“If you want to be against good, sound childhood vaccination policies — vaccines that have been proven safe and effective for decades — you have to be against clean water and against proper wastewater and food protection,” Edney said.
Dr. John Gaudet, a pediatrician in Mississippi for about three decades, said he fears the controversy over the COVID-19 vaccine will spill over into the ongoing national debate over childhood vaccinations.
“I think there was a point where you went to the doctor and almost took it as, ‘Well, this is what the doctor recommended,'” he said. “And so now there’s more of a consumer mentality: ‘Well, the doctor might say that, but maybe that doctor isn’t trustworthy.'”
The number of measles cases has now risen sharply across the country, at least with 132 measles cases reported so far this year, according to the CDC. Two-thirds of these cases involve people under the age of 19, and over half of them resulted in hospitalizations. Cases have spread to 20 states.
But not to Mississippi yet.
