School vaccine bill heads to floor without religious exemptions

Dr. Lisa Costello, a pediatrician with WVU Medicine, testifies before the Senate Health Committee Wednesday about the importance of strong vaccine mandates. (Will Price | West Virginia Legislative Photography)

A bill that would change West Virginia’s law for school-mandated immunizations is on its way to the full Senate for a vote.

The Senate Committee on Health and Human Resources amended House Bill 5105 , removing a provision that would have allowed students attending public schools to present a letter stating that their child cannot be vaccinated for religious reasons and the exemption would be granted.

As amended, the bill would allow religious and parochial schools to develop their own policies for immunizations and provide them legal protections for those choices, said health committee vice chairman Sen. Tom Takubo, R-Kanawha. It also allows vaccine exemptions for students attending virtual public schools.

Students who participate in West Virginia Secondary School Activities Commission-sponsored activities outside of their school would still need to be vaccinated. The amended bill also clarifies that if a student is attending some virtual school and some in-person school, the student should follow the requirements of the in-person school.

Takubo said that what’s been referred to as religious exemptions in the version of the bill the House of Delegates passed were actually philosophical exemptions. He said last year’s “religious freedom restoration act” allows people to object to vaccines on the basis of religious freedom infringement.

“I’m a strong vaccine advocate,” Takubo, a physician, said of the reason for taking the religious exemptions out of the bill. “I believe in keeping strong vaccines.”

According to the CDC, as of late last month, there were 41 cases of measles — a highly contagious potentially deadly disease — across 16 states, including Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. West Virginia’s last reported case of measles was in 2009, according to officials.

“I think what’s happened is a lot of people haven’t seen this in our lifetime, and so it’s easy to forget how severe and how infectious and contagious these diseases are until it’s too late,” Takubo said. “And what my fear is we’re going to continue to loosen these laws and then once it happens, it’s going to be a shock moment to think, ‘oh boy, what did we really do?’ and what I’ve told fellow legislators is, it may not be next year or 10 years but at some point, what I would hate for them to do is turn on the television and see, a case of measles or some preventable disease outbreak occur across West Virginia and several children are now dead, and they were responsible for allowing that to happen.”

Takubo voted against the bill and said he plans to vote against the legislation when it gets to the Senate floor, but he expects it to pass.

Four experts testified at the Senate Health meeting, including Dr. Lisa Costello, a pediatric hospitalist at WVU Medicine Children’s Hospital in Morgantown.

Costello said the bill causes her “great concern.”

“West Virginia is seen as a national leader when it comes to our routine childhood immunizations,” Costello said. “We lead the nation in our immunization rates and any public policy that could potentially lower those rates, opens the door to let in vaccine preventable diseases that we fortunately in West Virginia have not seen many cases of…

“I applaud the Legislature for the past 20 years under Democratic and Republican leadership for prioritizing the health and safety of our children to maintain our strong immunization policies,” she said. “So by allowing any school including a private school to potentially exempt from that, we’re opening the door to allow these vaccine-preventable diseases back into our communities.”

The committee also heard from Dr. Alvin Moss, a West Virginia University medical professor and the director of the West Virginia Center for Health Ethics and Law, who said he disagreed with Costello on vaccines. Moss said the state’s mandatory vaccine policy is coercion and goes against informed consent.

“So coercion really destroys true informed consent, and a mandatory policy goes against the whole idea of important consent,” he said.

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