Measles outbreak draws crowd to hearing on vaccine law
OLYMPIA, Washington — Antivaccine activists packed a public hearing Friday to oppose a bill that would make it harder for families to opt out of vaccination requirements for measles, mumps and rubella amid the state’s worst measles outbreak in more than two decades.
An estimated 700 people, most of them opposed to stricter requirements, lined up before dawn in the cold, toting strollers and hand-lettered signs, to sit in the hearing, which was so crowded that staff members opened up additional rooms to accommodate the crowd. Many gathered outside for a rally afterward.
Anti-vaccine activists, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent vaccine conspiracy theorist, claimed that health officials are covering up vaccine dangers. Some said their children had been injured or sickened by immunizations. One falsely said the majority of people diagnosed with measles have been vaccinated.
When Washington Health Secretary John Wiesman debunked those claims, some members of the audience murmured in disapproval.
“I want to remind you that the MMR vaccine is extremely safe and highly effective,” Wiesman told lawmakers. He said that “all reputable scientific studies have found no relation between measles and autism,” before outlining the potential harms of the highly contagious respiratory virus, which can be fatal in small children.
Wiesman urged lawmakers to pass the bill to eliminate personal or philosophical exemptions, noting the current outbreak, which has sickened at least 56 people in Washington and Oregon, is more alarming than the state’s three previous ones.
“This one is larger and infecting people faster than in recent history,” he said. “In states with tighter exemption laws, there is less suffering, fewer hospitalizations and more deaths averted.”
The bill, which would still allow exemptions for medical and religious reasons, is sponsored by Rep. Paul Harris, R-vancouver, who represents Clark County, the epicenter of the outbreak just north of Portland. He said he expects the bill to reach the House floor by the end of the month. A similar bill has been introduced in the Senate.
The Pacific Northwest is home to some of the nation’s most vocal and organized antivaccination activists. That movement has helped drive down child immunizations in Washington, as well as in neighboring Oregon and Idaho, to some of the lowest rates in the country, with as many as 10.5 percent of kindergartners statewide in Idaho unvaccinated for measles. That is almost double the median rate nationally.
Most of those infected in the current outbreak are unvaccinated children under age 10, health officials said. The outbreak has prompted a huge increase in the number of people getting vaccinated in Clark County, the epicenter of the outbreak.
The average number of immunizations has gone up from about 200 a week on average to more than 1,000 during the last two weeks of the month, Wiesman told reporters later.
“The challenge we face is that most people haven’t seen this, the effects of an outbreak,” he said. “If you travel the world, people will line up for this vaccine because they have seen it.”