Religious exemption stirs more debate
Stacked odds against state lawmakers who want to tighten vaccination requirements for this year
The contentious issue of ending the religious exemption for parents who don’t want their children vaccinated was always going to be a long-shot this year, for a General Assembly burdened by about 900 bills and a smorgasbord of controversial legislation on Gov. Ned Lamont’s wish list.
New school data issued earlier this month, showing 100 schools below 95 percent compliance, briefly revived the possibility of action that Democratic leaders have contemplated in recent years. But flaws including typographical errors in the report for towns including Redding, stacked the odds against state lawmakers who wanted to tighten vaccination requirements in time to meet the June 5 statutory adjournment.
If anything, a hastily scheduled public hearing on the issue that recently attracted hundreds of opponents to the state Capitol, illustrated the controversy. The seven-hour-long hearing, combined with a Department of Public Health that has yet to take a position on the religious-exemption issue, made general compliance seem adequate at a time when there have been just three reported cases of measles.
“Overall, our immunization rate for vaccine-preventable diseases is strong in Connecticut,” said Renee Coleman-Mitchell, DPH commissioner, in a statement. “As recent data show, however, we do have pockets of vulnerability within our state and that is a public health concern. Collectively considering all options to increase the rate of vaccination among our children is a desirable public health strategy.”
Of the 39,174 children in kindergarten during 2017 and 2018, 764 were exempted from vaccinations for religious claims, while 126 were forgiven for medical reasons among the 752 schools surveyed. Among 43,334 seventh graders in 518 schools, 132 were exempted for medical reasons, while 491 gave religious reasons, according to the DPH.
Measles, rubella and mumps are generally the key diseases targeted by immunizations. Religious exemptions are expected to soon end in Maine, where the governor has promised to sign a bill that cleared the legislature this week. Mississippi, California and West Virginia have also ended the exemption, citing the need to vaccinate as many children as possible.
House Majority Leader Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, who this year became the chief proponent for Connecticut’s repeal of the religious exemption, said Friday that the bill would have passed the House. Before the DPH school data emerged, he had doubted there was enough time to ready a bill this year, but when the new statistics indicating the more than 100 schools fell below the compliance threshold, he tried to revive and expedite the bill.
Ultimately, it was the flawed statistics and typographical errors that resulted in the delay until next year.
“It wasn’t a vote-count problem in the House or Senate,” Ritter said Friday. “People understand the problem. The problem is the details that come before that. No one is mad at DPH. Now we have to say that we agree on the problem, and make sure the data is current.” He expects new statistics for the current year emerging in June, but the DPH has also been instructed to look deeply into the issue.
“What I’m glad of is that we started the conversation,” Ritter said. “It was always our intention to finalize the bill in 2020. Let’s just see what the final numbers are.”
During the hearing that brought hundreds to the Capitol, Rabbi Tzvi Bernstein, dean of the Bi-Cultural Academy in Stamford, an Orthodox Jewish school with 350 students, said there are growing concerns about the apparent leniency of state law, which he believes is being used — and possibly gamed — by people without actual religious convictions to prevent their children from vaccinations.
“I will state that the theology of modern Orthodoxy is that’s there’s not only no religious exemption, there happens to be a biblical obligation to vaccinate children because of the fact that there is a Torah statement,” Bernstein said. “You must be very careful to safeguard your lives. That means that where the overwhelming medical community states that vaccinations are reasonably safe and certainly effective that we have an obligation to make use of that technology and science to protect not only our families and our children, but also the public welfare.”
Indeed, only a few major religious denominations — including Christian Scientists, Scientologists, and ultra-conservative Jews — forbid vaccinations.
Bernstein warned lawmakers that Stamford’s proximity to ultra-Orthodox communities in Rockland County and Brooklyn, N.Y., where 600 of the more than 700 cases of measles have occurred, make him and other religious leaders nervous.
“There is an interaction that we believe places our school community at somewhat higher risk of exposure,” he said. “We want to protect students and faculty, but we can’t because the legislature says that we would need to have a statement from the public health authority that says our school is a significant site. We feel that that’s a very untenable position to be placed in by the legislature.”