Public HealthCalifornia vaccine bill on hold as opposing parents threaten to keep their children out of school

California Senate Bill 277, which would require parents in California to vaccinate their children as a condition for enrollmentin either public or private schools, is facing opposition, after parents and lawmakers expressed their concerns that some children might be denied an education.

As theSacramento Bee reports, hundreds of parents, many with children alongside them, filled the corridors of the Capitol building last week to voice their opposition to the measure. Many said that it would allow the state to dictate to parents how to raise their children.

While many lawmakers sided with the Senate Health Committee’s argument thatthe bill was meant to advancepublic health, others in the Senate Education Committee were sympathetic to the concerns of parents.

“The bigger question here is the penalty for not immunizing their kids is that you have to … home-school … and I don’t think that’s a solution to the problem,” said Sen. Carol Liu (D-La Cañada Flintridge), who also leads the Senate’s education panel.

With other Democratic and Republican members also expressing similar doubts, Sen. Richard Pan (D-Sacramento) agreed to postpone the vote on the bill.

“If I were you, I would not take a vote today,” Liu said to Pan during a closed-door meeting. “Otherwise I don’t think your bill proceeds out of this committee.”

In the meantime, Pan and other lawmakers who support the bill are trying to make amendments to it so that they can satisfy those on the Senate Education Committee.

“If there are changes that will make the bill better, we should take the time to consider them,” Pan said in a recent statement.

California is one of nineteen states which permit parents to cite a personal belief exemption in order not to havetheir children fully vaccinated before entering school. Recent bouts of whooping cough and measles in the state, though, have led lawmakers to consider removing that clause with Senate Bill 277. Pan referred to a much publicized measles outbreak at Disneyland as “symptomatic of the low immunization rates.”

“We’ve basically been accumulating larger and larger numbers of unvaccinated people which is part of the reason this measles outbreak was able to spread,” he added.

Among the groups which have supported Pan and the bill are the school districts of Los Angeles and San Francisco, the California State Parent-Teacher Association, and the California School Boards Association.

However, some parents said that they would pull their children out of school if the bill became law, and others expressed concern that they would not be able to afford home-schooling their children.

“Home-schooling my children would not have been option for my husband and I had we chose not to vaccinate our children,” said Sen. Connie Leyva (D-Chino). “I was working, my husband was working, and I don’t even know that I would have been the best person to home-school my children.”

Still, others felt that the measure just needed more development. “I don’t think it’s fully cooked,” added Senate Minority Leader Bob Huff (R-Diamond Bar). Huff said that as it currently stands he would vote to oppose the bill.