California and Oregon have enacted similar requirements in recent years. The state allows medical, religious, and personal belief exemptions, and has an exemption rate of 5.2% in the 2014-15 school year. And, in states that allow philosophical and personal exemptions from vaccination requirements, such exemptions increased from 0.99 to 2.45% between 19.Ī Washington state law that took effect in July 2011 requires parents seeking vaccination exemptions for their children to discuss the benefits and risks of vaccination with a health care provider. In states with all three types of exemptions, personal belief exemptions tend to be most common. In most cases, parents must file a one-time or annual form with a school district attesting to a personal objection to vaccination. Twenty states allow exemptions to children whose parents have philosophical or personal belief objections to vaccination (Vermont and California will be removed from this list when legislation that eliminates the exemption goes into place in mid-2016). The argument is that the Equal Protection Clause should protect all people who claim a religious objection to vaccination, not only those who belong to a certain religion with recognized objections. At the same time, courts have often found that requiring parents to belong to certain religious groups to qualify for religious exemptions violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause. The rulings have in general upheld the right of states to mandate vaccination despite parents’ religious beliefs. Several legal cases involving the constitutionality of religious exemptions to vaccination have been tried. They may, as Iowa does, ask a parent to attest that "immunization conflicts with a genuine and sincere religious belief, and that the belief is in fact religious, and not based merely on philosophical, scientific, moral, personal, or medical opposition to immunizations." Other states simply require a parent to sign a form stating they have religious objections to vaccination. Some states statutes indicate that to receive a religious exemption, a family must belong to a religious group with bona fide objections to vaccination. The child has had a prior serious adverse event related to vaccination.The child has a serious allergic reaction to a vaccine component.In either case, vaccination could be harmful to the child’s health. Or, the child might take medications, such as chemotherapy or steroids, that impair the immune system. For example, the child might have a congenital condition, leading to an impaired immune system.
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