Here’s the latest vaccination news from the Golden State:
Gov. Jerry Brown, who preserved religious exemptions to state vaccination requirements in 2012, on Wednesday appeared open to legislation that would eliminate all but medical waivers.
The governor’s new flexibility highlighted a growing momentum toward limiting vaccination exemptions partly blamed for the state’s worst outbreak of measles since 2000 and flare-ups of whooping cough and other preventable illnesses.
….Earlier, five lawmakers had said they would introduce legislation that would abolish all religious and other personal-beliefs exemptions for parents who do not want their children vaccinated before starting school.
I grew up in a Christian Science family, and that makes me slightly conflicted on this subject. Partly this is because it left me with some residual sympathy for genuine religious objections, and partly it’s because the number of exemptions for genuine 
religious reasons is actually pretty small—less than 3,000 per year in California, according to the Times story.
But in the end, there’s just too big a can of worms when you try to distinguish “genuine” religious objections from personal objections that might be based on some kind of spiritual belief. If this were purely a personal choice, I’d go ahead and let parents decide. But it’s not. It’s a public health issue, and our top priority should be protecting public health. This requires vaccination rates above 95 percent both statewide and in every local area. As the map on the right shows, we’re not getting that these days.
There’s no state in the nation that’s more sympathetic to religious freedom than Mississippi. If it can ban exemptions for religious reasons, so can all the rest of us. The anti-vaxxers used to be an oddball nuisance, but in recent years they’ve turned deadly—and that means it’s past time to start taking them seriously. No more exemptions for deadly communicable diseases.
