California Assemblyman Devon Mathis said he’s disappointed that Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a bill that will require most children in the state to be vaccinated in order to attend public schools.
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On Tuesday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed one of the strictest mandatory vaccine bills in the country into law.
“The science is clear that vaccinations dramatically protect children against a number of infectious and unsafe diseases”, Brown wrote in a signing message.
Under the new law, parents may be exempted from the vaccination requirements only by a medical doctor who certifies there are circumstances (such as a family’s medical history or other medical problems) that indicate against immunizations.
Democratic Sens. Richard Pan (Sacramento), a pediatrician, and Ben Allen (Santa Monica), whose father has polio, introduced the measure following the outbreak of measles at the theme park. More than 140 people, including 131 Californians, were infected during an outbreak that emanated from Disneyland.
The governor’s signature doesn’t bring the fight to a close; just the legislative chapter of the story.
The attorney general’s office has yet to receive any other petitions for a vaccine bill referendum, a spokeswoman said.
Brown noted that the state Legislature amended the bill to allow exemptions from immunizations whenever a child’s physician specifically concludes there are reasons they are not advisable.
She says that the modern-day resistance movement shares its roots and rhetoric with the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s, including feminism, environmentalism and consumer rights. The bill still permits exemptions for children in public independent studies, off-campus schools and private home-based schools.
Numerous thousands of parents who lined Capitol hallways to express their opposition to the bill had said medical exemptions were too hard to obtain.
Opponents took out a full-page ad in the Sacramento Bee, an influential newspaper in California’s state capital, urging him to veto the measure by invoking the argument that pharmaceutical companies are behind the push to vaccinate children.
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“That’s when I realized, maybe there’s something to the vaccines, maybe they’re not as good as we think they are”, she said. The amendments included the inclusion of grandfather clause, that lets students maintain their personal belief exemption, until their next vaccine checkpoint, which would occur in kindergarten and seventh grade.
