The California Senate Education Committee on Wednesday, April 22, approved a bill requiring that children be vaccinated before entering school.
The legislation would eliminate California’s personal belief exemption, including those based on religion, and would allow only children who have been vaccinated to attend public and private schools.
Wednesday’s 7-2 vote comes a week after it stalled, as panel members raised concerns the bill could prevent young people from obtaining an education. Co-authors of Senate Bill 277 introduced amendments to accommodate those concerns.
“We think we’ve struck a fair balance here that provides more options for parents who don’t want to vaccinate their children,” said co-author Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica), who also added that the bill would enhance everyone’s safety against preventable diseases.
One of the changes is that families who opt not to immunize their children would be allowed to enroll them in a multiple-family private homeschool option rather than just a single family home. The second amendment will permit families who do not vaccinate their children to use the public school independent study option administered by local education agencies, the San Jose Mercury News reported.
Despite these modifications, California State Sen. Connie Leyva (D-Chino) voted against the measure.
“I just still have a concern it will not go far enough to help a two-working-parent family who can’t home-school their children or a single-parent family,” she said, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The bill now heads to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will weigh out its legal ramifications. It must then go through assembly committees and obtain Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature before becoming law. If Senate Bill 277 becomes law, California would become the third state – after Mississippi and West Virginia – to ban vaccination exemptions except for medical ones.
State health statistics indicate that more than 13,500 California kindergarteners are not immunized. Waivers indicate this is due to parent’s personal beliefs, and 2,764 claim religious beliefs.
Some committee members proposed a religious exemption when amending the bill, although it was not one Sen. Richard Pan (D-Sacramento) agreed with.
“Religious exemptions are vulnerable to abuse and indeed are abused by people whose reasons for not vaccinating are not religious,” said Shannan Martinez, a spokeswoman for Pan, according to the Times.
The bill was introduced partly in response to the measles outbreak that started in Disneyland last December. From Jan. 1 to April 17, more than 160 cases in 19 states were reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC reported that the majority of those infected were unvaccinated.
