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Arizona lawmakers voted last week in favor of three bills that would make it easier to obtain waivers of state vaccine requirements and would require doctors to provide much more money. Information to patients and their families about the potential risks of vaccines.
The bills removed the House Health and Social Services Committee from a vote of 5 to 4 GOP leaders and made their way to the Rules Committee before going to the rostrum.
HB 2470
adds a religious exemption to the current law requiring vaccinations and makes an amendment that would eliminate the requirement for parents to complete an exemption form informing them of the potential consequences of non-vaccination of their children. These consequences may include the obligation to keep unvaccinated children out of school in the event of an outbreak.
HB 2471
requires health care providers to give parents detailed information about vaccines, including the prescription leaflet.
Finally,
HB 2472
give patients, or their parents or legal guardian, an option for an antibody titration test to determine if the person has developed antibodies against vaccine-preventable diseases.
CNN contacted the invoice sponsor, Nancy Barto, who did not answer. She told Capitol Media Services: "These are not, in my opinion, anti-vaccine bills, they are discussions of fundamental individual rights."
Senator Paul Boyer, who sponsors a trio of bills in the state Senate, has expressed concerns about the ingredients contained in the vaccines.
Boyer stated that public health providers were not obliged to provide individuals with the same lists of ingredients as those provided with the product inserts, and that in doing so, he felt that the "health care" was not the same. State "did not engage in fully informed consent".
The senator stated that he had received several e-mails from parents who thought that their children had been injured by a vaccine and that would not have allowed their children to be vaccinated if they had could read the information in the box.
Information on the ingredients of the vaccine is available on the websites of the
Centers for Disaster Control and Prevention
and the USA
Food and Drug Administration
.
Boyer cited a federal case
Report of the Committee on Government Reform
With regard to the vaccination compensation program, the committee "agrees that paediatricians and health professionals should fully inform patients of the risks and benefits of vaccination"
Public health officials are concerned
Jennifer Tinney, Program Director for the Arizona Partnership for Immunization, or TAPI, said her non-profit coalition was "very concerned" about the ramifications of the three bills. She added that if the bills were passed, more children would be exempted from the vaccination and would decrease the immunity of the community.
Tinney said that there was no major religions opposed to vaccination and did not see the major need to add a religious exemption to the exemption from personal conviction already in force in the state.
Tinney said that Arizona already provides parents with "relevant and relevant information" children, written in "everyday language that everyone can understand." She feared that HB 2471 would intimidate parents by forcing them to "browse an information book" of up to 30 pages per vaccine and "up to 90 pages" if the child was receiving several vaccines in one visit.
"Having too much information can make decision-making more difficult," she said.
Tinney also fears that the HB 2472 antibody test could possibly give a "false positive", for example showing that an individual has been exposed to a pathogen, even if it does not occur. has not developed a complete long-term immunity.
At the hearing of the bill before the committee of health services and social services of the House of Representatives of the State, Liz McKenna, doctor and representative of more than 900 pediatricians from the section of the Arizona from the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the committee that his group "strongly opposes" lead to lower vaccination rates.
She added that even without the bills, the state's vaccination rates "have fallen to dangerously low levels".
The Department of Health Services of Arizona reported
that non-medical exemption rates increased from 2012 to 2017 and were highest in charter schools. In public schools, 4.2% of kindergarten children had non-medical exemptions; this figure was 8% in private schools and 9% in charter schools.
The debate on vaccinations is ongoing
For more than 100 years,
there was a public discord about vaccines
on topics such as individual rights, religious freedoms, mistrust of governments, and the effects that vaccines can have on children's health.
A study published last year on the state of the anti-vaccine movement in the United States showed that over the last decade, "philosophical" vaccine exemptions had increased in 12 of the 18 states authorizing such policies, including Arizona.
The report highlights metropolitan areas with more than 400 non-medical exemptions among kindergarten children. At the top of the list was Maricopa County, which includes the city of Phoenix, with
2,947 non-medical exemptions
among kindergarten children in 2016-17.
Debbie McCune Davis, Executive Director of TAPI, told CNN that
separate invoice
, which would have removed the exemption for personal beliefs, was not heard.
Last year, the Arizona Department of Health Services sounded the alarm that the growing number of exemptions in the state had led to
decreasing rates
vaccination two years in a row.
Washington State Takes Inverse Approach During Its Measles Outbreak
Meanwhile, in Washington State, lawmakers are considering a bill that would remove philosophical exemptions from school vaccination requirements,
the spokesman reported
.
An ongoing measles epidemic
invited the governor to declare the state of emergency last month. Local authorities confirmed that 31 of the 35 people initially affected had been vaccinated against measles. The Washington State Department of Health reported that 7.9% of children entering kindergarten during the 2017-2018 school year benefited from an immunization exemption.
"Once you start dipping below 95% vaccination, you start losing the immunity of the flock," said CNN's medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, about the outbreak.
Monday, the CDC
published a report stating
that there have been 159 measles cases in the United States so far in 2019 and that the Washington outbreak has reached 70 cases.
Brooklyn, New York, has a measles outbreak that officials have described as "worse" in two decades.
In 2019, 17 new cases occurred on this outbreak. A spokeswoman for the New York Department of Health
told CNN the new cases
"It would not have happened if the children had been vaccinated in time."
Measles is a life-threatening respiratory disease characterized by a rash of red and flat spots. It can appear in the United States if people bring it from other countries where the disease is still endemic.
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