A bill to be offered by California Democratic state Sen. Richard Pan would eliminate the “personal belief exemption” for measles vaccinations, forbidding parents to reject vaccination for their children.
It is commonly assumed that many people working in Silicon Valley possess higher intelligence, as the area is replete with scientists, technologists, and engineers. However, according to the California Department of Public Health (DPH), many of those same people are too smart–or not intelligent enough–to vaccinate their children.
Four-month-old baby Mobius Loop is up to date on American Academy of Pediatrics recommended vaccinations, but at his tender age, it’s too early for his measles shot. It was during a January 18 family trip to Disneyland that Baby Mobius is believed to have contracted the highly contagious measles disease–and his mother posted her “mixed feelings” online.
On his weekly Friday night panel discussion during his show Real Time, Bill Maher wasted no time jumping into the vaccination debate. Maher suggested that vaccines are preventable if people would simply eat better, attacked genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and defended climate change to make his own argument that inconsistencies within the medical profession are all the more reason not to trust vaccines.
California Governor Jerry Brown signaled an openness to the announcement of a bill co-sponsored by two state senators that would eliminate vaccine exemptions based on “personal” and religious belief on Wednesday.
California State Senators Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica) and Richard Pan (D-Sacramento) announced on Wednesday that they will be introducing a bill to end the ability of parents in the Golden State to exempt their children from school vaccinations based on personal beliefs and religion.
SAN DIEGO — Measles continues to sweep California, seeping into six other states and Mexico after an outbreak began mid-December at Disneyland, re-igniting controversy over parents under-vaccinating their children.
News is emerging that wealthy Hillary Clinton donors Albert and Claire Dwoskin are also critics of vaccination.
Elementary schools in the inner-city Los Angeles neighborhood of Compton have a far higher vaccination rate than schools in wealthy Beverly Hills, state data show. The rate in Compton is 93.80%, near the 2013-14 national median of 94.7%, with one school at 100%. In Beverly Hills elementary schools, the rate is a mere 78.33%, creating the conditions for an outbreak.
A Los Angeles Times report released early Wednesday morning reports that many child care facilities in Los Angeles have alarmingly low vaccination rates–some reportedly as low as 51%. The report indicates that private schools have lower vaccination rates than public schools, as wealthier parents opt out of inoculation for communicable diseases like measles.
After taking flack over his comments regarding vaccination, Republican Senator Rand Paul managed to fit in a booster shot for Hepatitis A at the Capitol physician’s office.
“Nobody reasonably thinks Chris Christie is opposed to vaccinating kids other than a bunch of reporters who want to write headlines,” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas says.
It’s suddenly obligatory for every Republican 2016 presidential hopeful to weigh in on vaccines and prepare for a grilling from the media if they voice anything less than enthusiastic support.
A new case of measles caused the shutdown of a Santa Monica High School day care center Monday after one of its infant attendees was diagnosed the disease. The current outbreak began in California’s Disneyland theme park with 74 of the 107 recent cases linked to the Magic Kingdom point of origin.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s outreach to the anti-vaccination crowd is one of the strangest things anyone has done during the 2016 shadow primary season. In the midst of a significant outbreak of preventable, communicable diseases among children, Christie decided to throw anti-vaxxers a bone, making President Obama look enormously sensible by comparison.
California and California-related cases of the measles now total 87, excluding any outside the state that have no known link to the December Magic Kingdom outbreak. California Department of Public Health officials have updated the known extent of the spread that now spans seven states and Mexico.
Californians are waking up to the fact that refusing to vaccinate their children endangers them. In 2014, for the first time in 12 years, less Californians claimed their beliefs disallowed immunizing their children, according to a Los Angeles Times data analysis. Health officials have stated that once the rate of non-immunization among the populace reaches 8%, an outbreak becomes more likely.
Public health officials are raising their measles intervention alert, urging adults to consider a measles vaccine booster as California now reports 59 cases of the disease.
Two dozen unvaccinated Huntington Beach High School students have been sent home over three weeks under threat of a measles outbreak. One had actually contracted the disease.
A study of California’s Bay area and Sonoma County suggests that the most under-vaccinated children in California are the very poor–and the very smart.
