Supporters of a bill that would eliminate the requirement for some children to receive the hepatitis B vaccine and modify other vaccine regulations argued to an Ohio House committee last week that the bill is really about parental choice.
Ohio House Bill 561 is a Republican-sponsored bill that would repeal hepatitis B vaccine requirements for daycares and preschools, something that matches up with federal moves to also remove that requirement.
Not only would it remove hep B from the required list of vaccinations, but it would also compel public schools to allow unvaccinated students to continue going to school in the case of a disease outbreak, along with other provisions about when and why a child can be denied admission to a school based on health or vaccination status.
Much like the sponsors of the bill did in a previous hearing, supporters of the bill emphasized that Ohio law already allows for medical, religious, and conscientious exemptions when it comes to vaccines, however the supporters told the Ohio House Health Committee that reports have come about that some workers in schools aren’t following the law.
Rebecca Morrison, director of Westerville’s private Oakstone Academy, said these days, she’s seeing similar vaccine alarm as she did when the academy first opened its doors in the 1990s.
She told the committee that because of “controversy” around vaccines from parents of autistic children, “I had parents frantic, asking for exemptions.”
“I don’t want to stand up and say that we did nothing, we just said that we are going to honor immunization exemptions, because I felt that that was the only way forward to build our program and to serve kids with autism,” Morrison said.
Studies published by the World Health Organization, the the scientific journal Autism, the journal Pediatrics, the journal Vaccine, and the Journal of the American Medical Association are among those that have determined there is no connection between autism and vaccines.
Decades on, Morrison said she has about a dozen or so parents per year in her school of about 650 students who tell her a different program or school won’t allow them vaccination exemptions.
She touted her school’s lack of infection spread, particularly as they were mask-optional and vaccine-optional during the COVID pandemic.
Still, the school has a “strict” cleaning and infection isolation policy, Morrison said. Of the 650 students, the director said 500 have vaccinations, and 150 do not, a difference from the early days when 75% of the kids were unvaccinated.
State Rep. Anita Somani, D-Dublin, said based on the percentages, it seemed like the school was “relying on herd immunity” now, but Morrison said she’d still support H.B. 561, even if the vaccination percentages were flipped.
“It has switched over, and yes, I do think herd immunity is part of that, but our first years, it’s part of the reason we have very tight controls for sanitizing the environment, for making sure that kids are going home if we even suspect that there’s an illness,” Morrison said.
For Northfield parent Stacey Kopec, a financial decision to take her three kids out of private school and enroll them in public school drove her to push for more enforcement around vaccine exemptions.
She called the bill “the only morally responsible thing to do” to make sure exemptions are “always honored.”
Comments from Kopec and Stephanie Stock, head of Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom, focused on the need for vaccine exemptions to be clearly identified and accepted throughout Ohio education.
“The notion that parents should be inherently aware that they have the right to decline is absurd,” Stock said.
“If all communication from the school or daycare indicates the vaccines are required, and the school nurse tells you it’s required, then a parent has no reason to suspect otherwise or further investigate.”
Currently, preschoolers and child care attendees are required to get vaccinations against chicken pox, diphtheria, haemophilius influenza type b (also called HIB), hepatitis A, hepatitis B, influenza, pertussis, pneumonia, polio, rotavirus, tetanus, and three diseases typically combined in one vaccine: measles, mumps, and rubella.
In Ohio’s K-12 schools, vaccines are required for diphtheria, hepatitis B, meningitis, pertussis, polio, tetanus, chicken pox, measles, mumps, and rubella.
In January, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a memo changing the recommended vaccination schedule for children, recommending vaccinations for measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, HIB, pneumonia, the human papillomavirus (HPV), and varicella.
RSV, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and the meningitis vaccine are recommended for “certain high-risk groups or populations,” and others such as the COVID-19 and flu vaccine are recommended “based on shared clinical decision making.”
According to the health data organization KFF, the changes “reduce the number of vaccines recommended for all children and, as such, have important implications on childhood immunizations and U.S. public health broadly, especially given the context of already declining childhood vaccination rates and ongoing outbreaks of diseases such as influenza and measles.”
This week, however, a federal judge put the January vaccination recommendations on hold, along with other decisions made at the Health and Human Services level.