Soon after, when the legislature formally took up a bill to expand exemptions, three former state health officers released a letter warning that it would \u201cweaken the hard-earned protections keeping our children, families, and communities safe.\u201d Keith Marple, an eighty-one-year-old Republican delegate from Harrison County, urged fellow-lawmakers to vote it down, and spoke of people he\u2019d known with permanent complications of polio. \u201cWe\u2019re here today voting not just on one child\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. but on the thousands of children in West Virginia coming into school age,\u201d he declared. \u201cAre we going to protect them? Or are we going to let them take their chances?\u201d This time, the legislation failed.<\/p>\n
West Virginia is a rural state with limited health-care infrastructure; many families don\u2019t have easy access to clinicians, and vaccination requirements create an impetus to engage with the medical system. \u201cThere\u2019s a big concern that if we open up exemptions, we\u2019re going to see these diseases roaring back,\u201d Steven Eshenaur, the head of the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department, told me. The state\u2019s extraordinary success in getting kindergarteners immunized belies a more complicated reality: immunization rates for toddlers, before the mandates apply, are among the lowest in the country. \u201cThe writing is on the wall,\u201d Eshenaur said. \u201cIf parents don\u2019t have to do it, it\u2019s probably not going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Morrisey hasn\u2019t withdrawn his executive order, which conflicts with the state\u2019s immunization law, and has generated confusion and uncertainty. The state\u2019s health department has granted hundreds of vaccine exemptions, while members of the Board of Education have unanimously decided to effectively ignore those exemptions. (Justice has called Morrisey\u2019s actions \u201cplain out and out nuts.\u201d Morrisey, in turn, derided Justice for holding a \u201cvery liberal position.\u201d) In May, some parents filed a lawsuit alleging that the governor\u2019s order placed immunocompromised children at risk; the mother of a ten-year-old boy with a serious genetic disorder said, \u201cSomething as simple as a common cold, that is not simple for him.\u201d Then a registered nurse named Miranda Guzman brought a rival lawsuit, after her child\u2019s school refused to honor a religious exemption. Morrisey\u2019s executive order doesn\u2019t require parents to explain their religious objection, and no major religion expressly forbids vaccination. (In the complaint, Guzman says that she believes it\u2019s wrong to needlessly interfere with her child\u2019s \u201cGod-given natural immune\u201d system.) \u201cIt is precisely religious people who should want to see the citation in scripture\u2014who should want chapter and verse,\u201d Christopher Martin, a public-health professor at West Virginia University, told me. \u201cYour grandparents were Christian, and they got vaccinated, didn\u2019t they?\u201d<\/p>\n
The movement to weaken the state\u2019s decades-old vaccination requirements is enmeshed with Kennedy\u2019s orbit. Aaron Siri, a Kennedy ally, is one of Guzman\u2019s lawyers, and the lawsuit is funded in part by the Informed Consent Action Network, an anti-vaccine organization founded by Kennedy\u2019s former communications director. Last month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights sent West Virginia an unusual letter, apparently threatening to withhold more than a billion dollars in funding if the state\u2019s health departments fail to grant exemptions outlined in the governor\u2019s executive order. \u201cI stand with @WVGovernor Patrick Morrisey,\u201d Kennedy posted<\/a> on X.<\/p>\n West Virginia\u2019s success in keeping children safe from vaccine-preventable illnesses highlights the singular power of immunization. Many of the struggles that children face\u2014obesity, isolation, mental-health challenges\u2014are knotty problems without easy answers. But a single policy can protect them from many infectious threats. With the federal government in retreat, vaccine wars have shifted to the states, and individual leadership can make a pivotal difference. Justice and Morrisey are both Republicans, but one expended political capital to preserve vaccination requirements while the other aims to weaken them. A judge has issued a preliminary injunction, allowing children of the plaintiffs in the Guzman case to attend school this fall, and soon West Virginia\u2019s Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether school officials should follow the state\u2019s legislature or its governor. Its decision will serve as a test of whether an unlikely state can continue to lead the way.<\/p>\n In the U.S., public-health authority rests largely with the states. Within their borders, states have broad power to issue quarantines, enforce curfews, regulate businesses, require seatbelts, and license medical professionals. For decades, they\u2019ve moved more or less in lockstep on issues of immunization, using the C.D.C.\u2019s recommendations to develop their requirements for entry into schools, day cares, and other communal spaces. Since the nineteen-eighties, every state has required that virtually all school-age children get vaccinated against diseases such as polio, measles, and tetanus. The C.D.C. estimates that routine childhood vaccination in the U.S. has saved more than a million lives, averted hundreds of millions of illnesses, and led to trillions of dollars in societal savings.<\/p>\n The nation\u2019s vaccination apparatus was already fraying before the rise of MAHA. Since 2019, vaccination rates have fallen in about three-quarters of U.S. counties, according to an NBC News-Stanford analysis, and more than half of them have experienced at least a doubling in the level of vaccine exemptions. Research consistently shows that exemptions result in a higher rate of vaccine-preventable diseases. One study<\/a> found that kids who received exemptions were twenty-two times more likely to contract measles and nearly six times as likely to get whooping cough.<\/p>\n Instead of motivating a federal approach to shared problems, America\u2019s increasingly nationalized politics have led to a fracturing of public-health policy. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have all recently issued recommendations that conflict with vaccine guidance from the federal government. This month, America\u2019s Health Insurance Plans, the nation\u2019s largest association of health insurers, announced that through the end of 2026 its member plans would cover all shots recommended by the C.D.C.\u2019s vaccine-advisory panel prior to the recent meeting. Democratic-led states are taking steps to protect access to vaccines. Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey said that the state would require insurers to cover immunizations recommended by its health department. California, Oregon, and Washington have created an alliance to develop vaccine recommendations, and New Mexico recently authorized pharmacists to deliver COVID-19 shots based on its own guidelines. The state\u2019s health secretary said that it \u201ccannot afford to wait for the federal government to act.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Soon after, when the legislature formally took up a bill to expand exemptions, three former state health officers…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":253122,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[107313,245,210,1141,1142,153,67,132,68,16944,2857],"class_list":{"0":"post-253121","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health-care","8":"tag-anti-vaxxers","9":"tag-children","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-health-care","12":"tag-healthcare","13":"tag-policy","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us","17":"tag-vaccinations","18":"tag-vaccines"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115263910174439426","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}