Us & Them: Childhood Vaccines — Parental Rights vs. Public Health in West Virginia

West Virginia’s vaccination requirements for school children are what a lot of health experts call the gold standard. Only a medical exemption will get you out of school vaccine requirements. 

On this episode of Us & Them we look at a recent legislative proposal that would have changed that. It would have exempted homeschooled kids from vaccinations and let private and parochial schools set their own standards. 

The bill came from some parents who want relief from what they call the state’s oppressive compulsory vaccination laws. While the bill passed through the legislature, it did not become law after Gov. Jim Justice vetoed the measure. We’ll find out about this latest chapter in a state with one of the nation’s most robust vaccine histories.  

This episode of Us & Them is presented with support from the CRC Foundation and Daywood Foundation.

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“I’ve done  countless stories about, ‘Hey, get your vaccines.’ ‘Here’s where you can get your vaccines.’ But I hadn’t really delved into ‘should you get your vaccines.’ There’s been conversation around the West Virginia legislature among lawmakers to try to weaken vaccine laws for at least two or three years. West Virginia has what a lot of immunologists call the ‘gold standard’ when it comes to vaccination policies, school entry policies that is.”

— Emily Rice

“I received a Hepatits B vaccine and was injured and it was a physician who told me this. I’m trained. I’m a WVU [School of Pharmacy] grad from 2005 and no one ever told me that this was a thing. Adverse events can happen. This is how you take care of it. That’s more a tragedy than even that something happened to me. But it was because of that traumatic event that I experienced. That’s when I was able to understand and listen. There was an episode on the Brady Bunch where Marsha Brady had the measles and stayed home and ate ice cream. That’s what we get so fearful about. And so, the other thing I would say is most of the parents, they know the diseases. They understand the diseases for which they’re vaccinating for and you have to be able to assume the risk. Is it okay that I get the disease and I can deal with that and I’m healthy enough to be able to overcome that? Or on the flip side, is the vaccine going to be okay for me and not cause any injury?”

— Chanda Adkins

“What I always wonder about when I talk to legislators are: ‘Do you grasp the concept of action – consequence?’ ‘Have you really thought through what’s going to happen in the future when you pass this?’ And I can honestly say that most were in denial. People want freedom, but freedom always comes with a fee. What are you willing to pay for it? What are you willing, as a society and as an individual, to pay for it? We have the laws in our system now. Why? Because it’s about the community first. All of our laws would create this system that we have here to create a stable, safe, and, an environment that allows everyone to live in some peace and harmony.”

— Dr. Steven Eshenaur

“[We reviewed massive amounts of data for the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines.] 800 pages of data, and I can promise you I read every word of all these studies, the details of all these studies. I couldn’t wait to get vaccinated. I would say I was an informed person about getting that vaccine and could not wait to get vaccinated and assumed other people would feel the same way because it was all we had. Here you had a novel pathogen, SARS CoV 2 virus, which had unusual biological characteristics, unusual clinical characteristics, that we were now going to meet with a vaccine strategy, messenger RNA, that we’d never used before. I think it was honestly the single greatest medical or scientific achievement in my lifetime.”

— Dr. Paul Offit

“The very first vaccine was invented at the very end of the 18th century, the 1790s, and it was a vaccine against smallpox. When this first smallpox vaccine was developed, European nations started to say, ‘Hold on, here’s something so powerfulwe can actually stop smallpox outbreaks if we require people to get the smallpox vaccine.’ So as long as we have had vaccination laws or regulations  we have had members of the public  saying, ‘Hold on, no, we want to make a decision for ourselves. Or in some cases, they argued it should be God’s decision.”