New York’s Vaccine Mandate

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/opinion/letters/new-york-vaccine-mandate.html

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To the Editor:

Re “Infecting People Isn’t a Religious Right” (editorial, May 22):

Ending the religious exemption to New York’s vaccine mandate is a step in the right direction, but it may not go far enough.

A study my colleagues and I published suggests that after California banned personal belief and religious exemptions to the child vaccine mandate in 2016, there was a surge of medical exemptions, concentrated in certain California counties.

The scientific evidence from our study suggests that some California parents went shopping for a doctor who would give their child a medical exemption. These troubling trends mean that California still has pockets of unvaccinated people and that those hot spots are at risk for a future outbreak.

As the editorial rightly notes, New York legislators should move forward on banning religious vaccine mandates, action that would help increase the state’s overall coverage. In addition, they should consider tightening the medical exemption process, making sure that these waivers are given only when medically appropriate.

And they should think about tighter education for parents so that they fully understand the risks associated with these waivers, both for their own children and others’.

After all, measles is still a potentially deadly disease that can surge again and again if we do not take steps now to protect the most vulnerable among us.

Avi DorWashingtonThe writer is a professor of health policy and management at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health.