California legislators introduced a bill that would tighten the state’s childhood immunization law, already one of the strictest in the nation.
State Sen. Richard Pan, center, discusses his proposed measure to tighten California's law requiring childhood vaccinations.
The new bill, SB 276, would address this loophole by requiring the state health department to vet each medical exemption form written by physicians. The department would also maintain a database of exemptions that would allow officials to monitor which doctors are granting the exemptions. “Unfortunately, a few unethical physicians advertise medical exemptions for cash,” Pan said at a news conference in the state Capitol.. That dropped their collective immunity below the 95% threshold that physicians say is needed to prevent outbreaks of highly contagious disease such as measles.overall in California, the number of kindergartners with medical exemptions spiked 441% after the law took effect.
But Rebecca Estepp, who was part of a group that opposed the original vaccine law, said she feels medical exemptions are facing undue scrutiny. Though some schools have higher medical exemption rates, only 0.7% of kindergartners have a medical exemption statewide, she pointed out. Estepp also worried that a state-run database of exemptions would frighten physicians out of writing them for valid medical reasons, such as a child undergoing chemotherapy.“What doctor is going to want their name on a database?” she said. “It’s going to be very difficult to have a doctor want to write an exemption under this sort of scrutiny.”
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