Updated on Friday, Feb. 28, 2025 at 1:30 p.m.
Lawmakers held a hearing this week on controversial legislation that would change West Virginia’s school-entry vaccination requirements to allow for religious and philosophical exemptions.
Under current state law, children must be immunized against chickenpox, hepatitis-B, measles, meningitis, mumps, diphtheria, polio, rubella, tetanus and whooping cough before enrolling in school.
Senate Bill 460 would allow for religious and philosophical exemptions to these vaccinations. Monday afternoon’s hearing continued until nearly 10 p.m. after a short recess. Lawmakers heard differing opinions and personal anecdotes from 13 presenters.
Health Freedom Advocates
Speakers ranged from physicians who are proponents of childhood vaccination to advocates for the repeal of vaccine requirements in the state. Parents gave impassioned speeches about their children’s or their own experiences with vaccine injury.
West Virginia allows medical exemptions to school-entry vaccination, a process that parents told lawmakers during the hearing is flawed and has left them feeling a lack of control over their children’s well-being.
Among those who testified was Alvin Moss, a professor at the West Virginia University (WVU) School of Medicine and member of West Virginians for Health Freedom (WVHF) — an organization that, according to its website, “advocates for legislative policies that recognize parental choice without discrimination.” He prefaced his remarks by telling the committee that his views do not represent WVU.
Moss said he thinks parents often vaccinate their children without informed consent, under pressure from their physicians.
“The case of mandatory vaccines is one in which vaccination would be forced or compelled,” Moss said. “It’s called a compulsory vaccination law in West Virginia, the argument used to mandate or compel vaccination over the liberty interest of people is public health ethics.”
Moss further argued the medical community ignores scientific research about vaccine injuries.
“They know the vaccines come with serious adverse events, they’ve seen them in their children,” Moss said. “There’s a group in West Virginia called West Virginians for Health Freedom. We’re right around 3,000 families that are members now. Every day, I think three or four or five families ask if they can join.”
Lawmakers heard many firsthand accounts from parents like Jennifer Painter, a registered nurse and member of WVHF, who described the group as “a grassroots group of moms, mostly of vaccine-injured children.”
A vaccine adverse event, commonly called a vaccine injury, is an adverse event believed to have been caused by vaccination. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), while “any vaccine can cause side effects,” most side effects are minor, primarily including sore arms or a mild fever.
However, proponents of compulsory vaccination repeal do not trust these agencies.
“In the COVID pandemic with the vaccine mandates, public health lost the trust of the American public,” Moss said. “In January of 2022, in an NBC News poll, the majority of Americans said they no longer trusted the CDC with their COVID recommendations. More recently, in the 2024-2025 vaccination season, 80% of Americans have decided not to take the COVID shot, even though the COVID shot is strongly recommended presently by the CDC. I can tell you from my own experience as a physician, my patients tell me they no longer take the COVID shot.”
Parental Concerns
Throughout the hearing, parents and subject matter experts testified that after receiving certain innoculations, their children developed allergies, learning disabilities and autism. In Painter’s case, her family attributes her son’s cancer diagnosis to a scheduled childhood vaccination.
“He had an acute lymphoblastic leukemia,” Painter said. “He has MTHFR gene mutation. He has several copies of each possible in the genetic mutation. We had lots of genetic testing, and I’ve had several doctors. We can’t prove that that (vaccine) was the only cause, but it definitely played a role.”
Painter, a mother of two, testified that she was never educated on vaccines during her time in nursing school; she only knew the vaccine schedule of recommended periods for patients to receive certain doses of each shot.
“I never questioned vaccines until my oldest son was two years old,” Painter said. “I walked into the pediatrician’s office when he was two, and I had this mama gut feeling. I was not on social media. I wasn’t in mom groups. I had not heard really anything about vaccines.”
Painter testified that she told her child’s pediatrician, who was also her childhood pediatrician, that she was uncomfortable with the vaccinations her child was scheduled to receive at the appointment that day, but the physician refused to hear her concerns.
“I was coerced into giving the vaccines. I was told I was a registered nurse, and this is what we’re going to do,” Painter said. “It was not informed consent. They held my son down and gave him the shots and I threw up in the trash can because that mama gut in me knew something was going to be wrong.”
During Painter’s questioning, Del. Anitra Hamilton, D-Monongalia, a health care worker, pushed back on Painter’s claim.
“When you told your story, you said that they held your child and they gave the vaccine against your consent,” Hamilton said. “Did you report that hospital, that nurse? Did you report this incident at all? I mean, you know you are a mandated reporter, so if someone held your child down without your consent and gave a medication that you did not consent to.”
Painter answered that she did not report the pediatrician and only consented to the vaccinations under duress.
“I consented, but I was coerced into it,” she said.
Painter told lawmakers that, after the appointment with her pediatrician, she began to read the package inserts for vaccinations and was horrified at the substances included in some vaccinations.
“I couldn’t believe what I was reading,” Painter said. “I looked at the ingredients and just about died. Formaldehyde has an MSDS sheet that’s a known carcinogen, aluminum and mercury, both neurotoxins.”
According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), aluminum salts are incorporated into some vaccine formulations as an adjuvant, a substance added to some vaccines to enhance the immune response of vaccinated individuals.
Also, according to the FDA, formaldehyde is used to inactivate viruses to prevent disease and detoxify bacterial toxins. It is diluted during the vaccine manufacturing process, but traces of formaldehyde may be found in some current vaccines; however, the amount of formaldehyde present in some vaccines is so small compared to the concentration that occurs naturally in the body that it does not pose a safety concern.
Painter ended her testimony by sharing her concerns for her children if she is not able to continue homeschooling because she refuses to vaccinate them, a current requirement for entry to West Virginia schools.
“This is the hill that I’ll die on,” Painter said. “My son was injured. I have deeply held religious beliefs, and I will not vaccinate my children. God forbid something happens to me and I can’t homeschool, because I love to home school, and I will continue to home school. But what if I can’t? What if I’m in a car wreck and I’m paralyzed? We all know that life does not go the right way. What would you like me to do? What would you suggest that I do with my children? Are you going to tell the mother of a pediatric cancer survivor with major genetic mutations and unable to detox that I have to give him vaccines for him to go to school because I can no longer home school?”
Chanda Adkins is a pharmacist, former state delegate and member of WVHF, but said she was testifying on her own behalf at Monday’s hearing.
Adkins told lawmakers she experienced a vaccine injury that caused her to lose her eyesight after receiving the hepatitis B vaccine in pharmacy school.
“My health was destroyed. And it was a physician, you have to understand. It was a physician who said to me — a very prominent physician at an academic center — who said, ‘Have you recently had the hepatitis B vaccine?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘This is what I’m seeing in my practice.’ So this is not just even my story. The story that I speak is for many others.”
Side effects of optic neuritis include vision loss, papillary edema, uveitis, acute placoid pigment epitheliopathy and central vein occlusion.
According to a case report published by the Journal of the Chinese Medical Association in 2009, a 9-year-old girl was diagnosed with optic neuritis following a hepatitis B vaccination.
The authors of the report concluded that acute optic neuritis might be a rare complication of hepatitis B vaccination, but called the complications “very uncommon.” They also wrote that “parents should be aware of the potential serious side effects of the vaccine.”
Lawmakers asked Adkins about her religious convictions following her testimony.
“As a believer, I believe that God gives me discernment. I discern situations, and sometimes [the way I’ve discerned] it is in thoughtful prayer, and it’s walking away from a situation,” Adkins said. “But as a mother, I don’t want to be questioned as a mother. Because all the mothers that I stand here to represent today, I can promise you — if this law does not pass, you’re not going to force these mothers that where their children maybe have suffered. They’re not going to put their subsequent children at risk for the sake of the education.”
Adkins told the committee she is not afraid of measles, but she is afraid of possible further vaccine injuries.
“Do you know that, based off of the testimony of Dr. Christensen, my children don’t qualify for a medical exemption because my children never experienced this? I did, but my children didn’t. But based off of his testimony, now they’re not going to get a medical exemption,” Adkins said.
Public Health Oversight
Former state health officer Dr. Matthew Christiansen was the first witness called to testify at Monday afternoon’s hearing. He resigned as state health officer in December 2024 to return to private practice.
During his testimony, Christiansen provided his perspective from spending four years as the deciding authority on the state’s existing medical exemption process and proposed provisions to the bill he said would protect vulnerable children.
“I do think that although this debate has been characterized as, ‘You’re either on one side or the other,’ I do think there is a middle ground somewhere,” Christiansen said. “Even if this bill were to pass and we were to open up exemptions, there are a handful of things, as I outlined in my testimony, that we could do to reduce the potential negative consequences going forward and allow us enough information to be able to intervene or change our policy if it’s not working.”
He said he understands how personal the issue of childhood vaccination is and that he sympathizes with concerned parents and advocates.
“Implementing this policy is one of the hardest pieces of the job of being state health officer,” Christiansen said. “It is, bar none, one of the things that I’ve struggled with the most and have thought a lot about from a medical standpoint, from an ethical standpoint, a philosophical standpoint and a spiritual standpoint.”
Christiansen’s first recommendation for Senate Bill 460 is to restore it to its original form, which included a provision requiring schools to create and maintain a report on the number of exempt schoolchildren. He said recordkeeping could be vital in the event of an outbreak.
He also recommended allowing private and parochial schools and private child care establishments to determine their vaccination requirements, requiring the doctors who sign off on medical exemptions to be from West Virginia and ensuring the state adequately funds local health departments.
“The governor got this right in his budget bill by increasing some of the funding for local health departments. They are really the frontline, basic infrastructure that we need to keep if there is one case of measles, like happened in Monongalia County, to keep it to one case and not let it spread widely across a region, a county or state,” Christiansen said.
Monongalia County’s April 2024 measles case is often used as an example of the effectiveness of West Virginia’s strict vaccination policy by opponents of changing vaccine requirements because it was officially contained within 18 days.
The case was reported on April 22 in Monongalia County and linked to international travel. Local health departments and the West Virginia Department of Health tracked more than 150 people who were potentially exposed, including 128 West Virginia residents from 30 counties and four states.
Andrea Lauffer is a pediatric hospitalist at WVU Medicine Thomas Hospitals. She began her testimony by reciting names from pre-1955 public death records for West Virginians who died from polio and measles.
“Now we’re seeing measles outbreaks in Texas, New Mexico and Ohio. Not too long ago, there was a case of polio in New York,” Lauffer said. “These diseases once thought to be a thing of the past are now back.”
Measles was a frequent talking point during Monday’s hearing, as each presenter and lawmaker’s interpretation of Texas’s current measles outbreak depended on which side of the vaccine divide they landed.
Lauffer argued that, as more states adopted nonmedical exemptions for school-entry vaccination, the U.S. began to lose its herd immunity, allowing for outbreaks of vaccine-preventable illness across the country.
“As a result, the cracks in our herd immunity began,” Lauffer said. “Herd immunity is needed to protect those too young to be immunized and those that can’t be immunized for medical reasons.”
Proponents of loosening vaccination restrictions, like Painter, told lawmakers their distrust in the safety and efficacy of vaccination outweighs any fear of catching measles.
“This is Merck MMR vaccine insert,” Painter said. “It says it’s a live virus. That means it can shed. There was actually a measles clinic before the outbreak in Texas.”
Merck is a manufacturer of the MMR vaccine, which combines immunization against measles, mumps and rubella into one shot for individuals 12 years or older.
According to an article published in 2023 by the National Institute of Health on the safety and a substance, like a vaccine, drug or pathogen, to trigger an immune response in the body, or immunogenicity, of live vaccines in pediatric liver and kidney transplant recipients, no serious adverse events were observed following live vaccination; the majority of children developed protective antibodies.
Texas’ outbreak has infected more than 130 people. On Wednesday, state and local health officials confirmed the death of a child who was not vaccinated for measles.
The Senate passed Senate Bill 460, the vaccine exemption bill, on Feb. 21. It was sent to the West Virginia House of Delegates for further consideration and remains in the hands of the House Health and Human Resources Committee for markup discussion.
**Editor’s Note: This story was updated to correct Andrea Lauffer’s title and affiliation.
