Bill to make vaccine data public

Proposed law would require all schools to report rates

A pair of state legislators are pushing to make more vaccination data public.

State Sen. Brad Hoylman, D-manhattan, and Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, D-bronx, introduced legislation Tuesday to require all New York schools to report their student body’s immunization rates to the state Department of Health. The department would monitor trends in the data and create a searchable database on its website recapping schools’ numbers, according to the bill.

“Parents have a right to know,” Hoylman said in a release. “As New York continues to recover from the worst measles outbreak in four decades, parents deserve to be informed whether their child’s fellow students are up to date on all their required vaccines.”

While some school immunization data is already available on the state health department’s website, the new bill would require officials to include data on New York City public schools.

The legislation comes just months after New York became the fifth state to outlaw religious exemptions for vaccine requirements in school children. That law, which Hoylman and Dinowitz also sponsored, came as the state faced hundreds of measles cases. It went into effect last month.

Parents had 14 days from the start of the academic year to prove their child is immunized or withdraw them from school. On Monday, vaccination opponents attempted another protest of the law at the state Board of Regents meeting. They marched to the Capitol for an impromptu press conference but officials blocked their entrance to the state’s Department of Education building.

Some parents have turned to medical waivers to exempt their children from the requirement, but they said many school districts have rejected those attempts.

The legislation stipulates that the health department would track trends in immunization data, including exemptions over time and areas where individuals might be more vulnerable to diseases. The department would “appropriately protect the confidentiality of individual identifying information” while reporting the data to the public, according to the bill.

“Through this legislation with state Sen. Hoylman, we will empower parents and families as well as health experts to make informed decisions about how to best ensure widespread immunization in every community,” Dinowitz said in a release.