BY: LORI KERSEY
A bill that completed legislation Saturday night loosens West Virginia’s laws for school-mandated vaccines.
The Senate signed off on House Bill 5105 with a 20 to 12 vote.
If approved by Gov. Jim Justice, the bill would allow private and parochial schools to develop their own policies for immunizations and provide them legal protections for those choices.
West Virginia law requires students be vaccinated for a series of contagious diseases. The state is currently among five in the country that allow only medical exemptions — not religious or philosophical exemptions — to those vaccine requirements.
House Bill 5105 would also allow 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 be required 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.
As the bill passed in the House of Delegates, the bill would have allowed students religious exemptions to vaccines if their parents presented letters.
The bill was amended by the Senate Health Committee to remove the religious exemptions.
During a speech from the Senate floor, Health Committee Chairman Sen. Mike Maroney, R-Marshall, a physician, called the bill “bad” and “a step backwards for West Virginia.”
“There’s no question, no question there will be negative effects to families, to children and immunocompromised adults,” Maroney said. “Not to mention the cost.”
“I took an oath to do no harm,” Maroney said. “There is zero chance I could vote for this bill.”
Maroney told a reporter after the vote that if it had been up to him, he would not have put the bill on the Health Committee’s agenda. Legislation that would weaken the state’s vaccine mandates comes up every year, he said, but this year the bill was a “bargaining chip,” he said.
“We beat it every year because I usually have full rein on my committee but this year I had to run it because the caucus demanded we run it,” Maroney said. “So we ran it… and it’s just a bad bill. It’s bad for West Virginia. There will be a lot of things happen. It might not happen next year or the year after, but they will happen. It’s a matter of time.
“There’s still 700,000 deaths worldwide due to the same vaccine preventable diseases,” Maroney said. “700,000 every year, like today. We had a polio case in New York three years ago. It was gone for decades. Stuff is coming back. It’s going to come back.”
Maroney pointed to rubella, also called the German measles, a vaccine-preventable disease that can cause miscarriage and birth defects. The disease is common in other countries but has been eliminated in the United States.
“Here’s how I can sum it up,” he said. “The same thing I said when I first started talking [on the Senate floor]: vaccines were a victim of their own success. They’re a victim of their own success. Because now people don’t realize how [diseases] ravaged the country before because they’ve been gone for so long.”
Health officials have long touted West Virginia’s strong vaccination laws as one of the things the state gets right. While several states have had outbreaks of measles, a highly contagious, potentially deadly disease, in recent years, West Virginia’s last reported measles case was in 2009.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as of March 7, there were 45 measles cases across 17 jurisdictions, including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland.
Dale Lee, president of the West Virginia Education Association, called the vaccine bill “very troubling.” Fortunately, he said, the bill kept the strict rules for public schools and for homeschool or private school students that play SSAC activities.
“But they play in the communities, they see each other,” Lee said. “That herd immunity, as Sen. Maroney so eloquently spoke, is at risk and that’s just — I believe, and everyone is right, I believe in religious freedom, but I don’t know any religion that has said ‘we’re against vaccines.’”
The bill awaits approval from Gov. Jim Justice.
‘There will be negative effects’: Senate signs off on weakening school vaccine laws
ByWest Virginia Watch
Mar 11, 2024