PHYSICIANS office RESOURCE FEBRUARY 2017
Physicians need to improve in relying on the power of teams to lead themselves with shared simple rules and deep mutual purposes .
California ’ s Vaccine Mandate is Working .
More States Should Adopt It
By Justin Morgan , MD A pediatrician who blogs at Bundoo . com , where this article originally appeared . He can be reached at his self-titled site , JustinMorganMD . com .
On June 30 , 2015 , California ’ s Gov . Jerry Brown signed into law Senate Bill 277 ( SB277 ), which tightened requirements so that parents could no longer opt out of vaccinating their children if they were attending state licensed schools , daycares , and nurseries .
Dr . Richard Pan ( D-Sacramento ), a pediatrician , sponsored the legislation , which quickly became a nationwide litmus test on the debate over personal liberty versus public health in the aftermath of the large , 2014 multi-state measles outbreak linked to Disneyland . The SB277 immunization requirements apply to students first admitted to school , child care , or entering seventh grade and took effect on July 1 , 2016 . West Virginia and Mississippi are the only other states that do not allow nonmedical exemptions .
Looking at the data so far , the number of vaccine holdouts is declining . The California Department of Public Health reported that 92.9 percent of all kindergarten children had
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received all required immunizations in the 2015 – 2016 school year , an increase from the previous year of 2.5 percentage points . This significant improvement in one year may be due to an earlier change in the law that required those desiring a personal belief exemption ( which SB277 now prohibits ) to visit with a doctor prior to obtaining the exemption to discuss the benefits and risks of immunizations and the risks of vaccinepreventable diseases .
One can infer that maybe some of the anti-vax parents were not so entrenched in their beliefs when it took additional effort to remain unvaccinated . Physicians , scientists , and public health experts see this increase in vaccine adoption as a win for herd immunity and disease outbreak prevention . The mandate is likely to increase the uptake of vaccines even further and will decrease California ’ s chances of having the next big outbreak .
While the American Academy of Pediatrics and nearly all of the 66,000 + pediatricians it represents have lauded the