Hundreds Rally For Their Right To Not Vaccinate Their Children

CBS News reports that as Washington state confronts a measles outbreak which has sickened at least 56 people, 'hundreds rallied to preserve their right not to vaccinate their children.'

They packed a public hearing for a new bill making it harder for families to opt out of vaccination requirements, reports The Washington Post:

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.... The Pacific Northwest is home to some of the nation's most vocal and organized anti-vaccination 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.... One activist who spoke Friday, Mary Holland, who teaches at New York University law school and said her son has a vaccine-related injury, warned lawmakers that if the bill passes, many vaccine opponents will 'move out of the state, or go underground, but they will not comply.'
The sponsor of a similar bill in Oregon says that anti-vaxxers 'have every right to make a bad decision in the health of their child, but that does not give them the right to send an unprotected kid to public school. So if they want to homeschool their kid and keep them out of other environments, that's their decision.'

But there are still 17 U.S. states that allow 'personal or philosophic exemptions to vaccination requirements,' reports the Post, 'meaning virtually anyone can opt out.' (Though some states are now considering changes.) 'The enablers are state legislators in those states, that have allowed themselves to be played,' complains Dr. Peter Hotez, a co-director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
The World Health Organization estimates that measles vaccines have saved over 21 million lives since 2000. But last year in the European region's population of nearly 900 million people, at least 82,600 people contracted measles, reports Reuters. 'Of those, 72 cases were fatal.'

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