A Lagunitas School District parent is among 21 plaintiffs suing the State of California, the state’s departments of education and public health to block a law passed last year that outlaws personal-belief exemptions for school-required, childhood vaccinations. Filed on July 14 by attorneys based in Washington, D.C., Wyoming and California, the lawsuit marks the latest effort to beat back tighter school enrollment restrictions that many expect will prompt an exodus of families unwilling to fully vaccinate their children for fear of harmful health effects.
The suit claims that the law violates the right for all children to receive education as guaranteed in the state constitution by barring children from attending schools who are not up-to-date with over 30 vaccines at kindergarten and seventh-grade “check points.” The suit also alleges that several local health departments—including Marin County Health and Human Services—have established monitoring programs to illegally track physicians who write medical exemptions, which the new law still allows. The suit also accuses some schools of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by barring special-needs students who are not fully vaccinated.
Depositions from over a dozen parents state that their children were denied admittance to schools throughout the state, despite obtaining medical exemptions and alternate vaccine-administration schedules authorized by physicians. Several parents stated that schools denied their children with special needs regardless of the fact that they secured medical exemptions in their individualized education programs, as allowed by the law.
In her deposition, Michelle Veneziano—a Mill Valley-based osteopathic physician whose daughter attends sixth grade at Lagunitas School District—said the law would prevent her daughter from entering seventh grade even though she has received all required vaccines except hepatitis B and Tdap, which fends off tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis. Dr. Veneziano stated that her daughter suffers from autoimmune conditions—including eczema and gastrointestinal distress—but that the Centers for Disease Control does not consider autoimmunity an exemptible medical condition.
Dr. Veneziano also believes physicians are inadequately informed of the potential adverse effects of vaccines as they go through medical school and post-graduate trainings. “Thorough analysis of the facts reveals that [the law] offers no actual public health benefit,” Dr. Veneziano wrote in an email to the Light. “What the law does is irreparably damage California’s unique legacy of equal access to education.”
Tom Torlakson, the superintendent of the California Department of Education and a defendant named in the suit, declined to comment. Robert Oakes, a spokesman for Mr. Torlakson, noted that the superintendent supports the law.
“It is the law of California and it is good for public health,” Mr. Oakes said. “The message is clear: you need to vaccinate your children to be in school.”
Karen Smith, the director of the California Department of Public Health and a defendant, also declined to comment.
Passed in July, Senate Bill 277—authored by Senator Richard Pan, a former pediatrician—fueled a heated national debate about whether vaccines for diseases like measles and whooping cough are truly safe for children, whether personal belief exemptions compromise public health and whether nixing personal belief exemptions was a violation of freedom of choice. The law took effect on July 1.
The law denies school enrollment for any student who has not received vaccines by kindergarten and seventh grade against 10 communicable diseases: diphtheria, haemophilus influenza type B, measles, mumps, pertussis, poliomyelitis, rubella, tetanus, hepatitis B and varicella (chickenpox). Unvaccinated students are barred from attending all classroom-based institutions, including public and private elementary and secondary schools, daycare centers, day nurseries, nursery school, in-home family daycares and development centers. Private homeschooling and non-classroom-based independent programs are exempt from the requirements.
Only students with physical conditions or medical circumstances that make immunization unsafe will be granted vaccine exemptions. To obtain an exemption, a licensed physician must recommend it, state the exact circumstances under which the exemption is given and file a written statement with the student’s school. The law does not address alternate vaccine schedules that many parents seek through their physicians.
Nowhere in West Marin are fears of vaccines better illustrated than the San Geronimo Valley, where a contingent of parents have long obtained personal-belief exemptions rather than give their children what they deem potentially harmful vaccines.
Last school year, 10 out of 17 kindergarteners enrolled in Lagunitas School District’s Open Classroom program filed personal-belief exemptions. That nearly 60 percent opt-out rate stands in stark contrast to Marin’s 6 percent rate, which dropped from 6.5 percent last year.
The suit notes that for the 2014-15 school year, 2.54 percent of kindergarteners enrolled in California schools filed personal-belief exemptions, the suit notes. That school year, the medical-exemption rate was only 0.19, with 6.8 percent of kindergartners enrolled on the condition that they would be fully vaccinated per an alternative schedule.
Based on these percentages, the suit says the new law is unnecessarily stringent. It also claims that the law’s requirements are too vague, leaving decisions about how to implement it up to schools’ varying interpretations. As a result, the suit contends, families still unwilling to fully vaccinate their children feel they have little recourse but to homeschool or move out of the state.
“Today, as a result of the enactment of Senate Bill 277, the State of California denies tens of thousands of children access to its schools and daycares and relegates them to the separate-and-unequal position of learning in isolation, in permanent quarantine,” the suit states. “S.B. 277 forever exiles them from schools and daycares, in a dramatic departure from California’s long-standing history of unwavering protection of every child’s right to a free, equal and public education.”
Additionally, the suit alleges that several local health departments have violated health and safety code by tracking which physicians issue medical exemptions. Such monitoring intimidates physicians through possible loss of licensure and misleads them as to the requirements of health and safety code, which gives physicians sole authority to issue medical exemptions, the suit states.
Lisa Santora, the supervisor of Marin County Health and Human Services’ Communicable Disease and Prevention program, said the agency has begun issuing a new, voluntary form whereby school nurses may name the physician who authorized a student’s medical exemption. She said the form is used to catalogue which vaccines parents are seeking exemptions from and as a way to help physicians understand specific language required for the exemption.
“Some physicians were submitting exemptions that did not have the required elements,” Dr. Santora wrote in an email to the Light. “The form…is a mechanism for us to collect data and monitor use of medical exemptions. This information is being gathered to inform future outreach and education. Our primary goals are decreasing medical exemption rates and increasing vaccination rates.”
She added that the form would help the county update exemption records more frequently than the current annual basis, and that the county has not yet determined whether to send reports on physicians to the state’s medical board.
A preliminary hearing on the suit is scheduled for Aug. 12 in the U.S. District Court’s Southern District of California, in San Diego.