A New Jersey bill that would have prohibited all exemptions to vaccines for students at public or private schools was killed last week after anti-vaccine advocates and skeptical parents convinced Republican lawmakers to vote against the measure. Eventually, the libertarian argument that guardians not government should decide children’s health care won out.

Despite testimony from the New Jersey chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, no amount of expert evidence could convince parents that vaccines save lives. Doctors and public health officials who battled a measles outbreak in the state last year hoped the new bill would persuade parents that vaccines are safe and effective. The World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that there were nearly 10 million cases of measles in 2018, which resulted in an estimated 140,000 fatalities.

The defeat of the bill signaled a victory for vaccine skeptics across the country who are seeking religious exemptions to vaccines. Although other states like New York, California, Mississippi and West Virginia have voted against religious and philosophical exemptions to vaccination, the anti-vaxxer movement is still going strong in many parts of the US.

“New Jersey is the state that is arguably the home of the pharmaceutical industry, and we just won in their backyard,” said Del Bigtree, an anti-vaccine activist from Texas who lead a protest in Trenton. He was joined in the city by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., director of the Children’s Health Defense network, who opposes mandatory vaccination and who believes that there is a link between autism and vaccines, a notion that has been disproven by researchers.

According to Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, “The anti-vaxx movement in America has gained strength because it runs largely unopposed. There is no big national counter to its rhetoric.” Dr. Hotez, whose daughter has autism, is the author of Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism.

In the 2013-14 school year, roughly 9,000 students in New Jersey, or 1.7 percent, had religious exemptions to mandatory vaccination. However, in the 2018-19 school year, 94.2 percent of students in New Jersey were fully vaccinated, and about 14,000 children, or 2.6 percent, had religious exemptions. The trend has caused concern among health officials.

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Dr. Alan Weller, who supported the bill, said vaccination was essential to keep healthy children safe from others who have valid medical exemptions or are too sick to be immunized. “Medical-only exemptions provide a cocoon for these kids,” said Dr. Weller, the associate director of pediatric medicine at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and the president of the state chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “Children in school need to be protected.”

Source: The New York Times