Gov. Kate Brown pledged her support Friday for legislation that would eliminate non-medical excuses for not vaccinating school children, a measure pushed by physician Sen. Elizabeth Steiner Hayward, D-Portland, amid a growing measles epidemic.
“I support having our children be vaccinated unless they are otherwise medically not allowed to,” Brown told reporters in her first news conference as governor.
Senate Bill 442 has support from physician legislators in both political parties, but Brown’s position on vaccination laws became unclear after a vaccine skeptic claimed that she had worked with him on legislation as a state senator to expand rather than reduce the number of exemptions for school children.
Brown helped Portland attorney Robert Snee introduce the 2001 bill, Senate Bill 450, through the Senate Rules Committee, but her communications director, Kristen Grainger, told The Lund Report on Friday that Brown never supported his bill.
“Senate Bill 450 was introduced on the behalf of one of her constituents,” Grainger said. “Kate’s a firm believer in giving people access to the democratic process.”
Ferrioli Scuttled Bill
SB 450 was heard in the Senate Education Committee and drew the support of the committee chairman, Sen. Charles Starr, R-Hillsboro. The bill appeared twice before the committee, but failed to reach the Senate floor when Sen. Ted Ferrioli, R-John Day, joined with the committee’s three Democrats to oppose the bill.
Ferrioli said he sympathized with those who didn’t want to wear seat belts or helmets because they didn’t want the government telling them what to do, but vaccination was different because of the impact on public health.
“I’m worried about giving a philosophical exemption. I believe it will ultimately cause a breakdown in the public health practice we have [that] protects the public on a broad front,” said Ferrioli, who now serves as the Senate Minority Leader. “I meet people every day with a wide divergence on philosophy and often it has nothing to do with health but attitude.”
The Oregon Health Division at the time testified that they opposed any attempt to expand the number of non-medical exemptions to school vaccination requirements, but that a philosophical exemption would be moot regardless, since the attorney general had long determined that the existing “religious” exemption from vaccinations was the same as a “philosophical” exemption.
The 2001 hearing featured many of the same public health advocates who testify in Salem today -- including Salem pediatrician Dr. Jim Lace; Dr. Paul Cieslak, the director of the state immunization program; and Susan King of the Oregon Nurses Association, who at the time was working with the Oregon Partnership to Immunize Children.
The push by Snee and the Oregon Chiropractic Association to broaden exemptions in 2001 took place in an environment where concerns about communicable diseases were much more hypothetical than they are today. Measles had been declared eradicated in the United States in 2000; “In Oregon, we probably do have herd immunity of our population,” Cieslak said in 2001 -- made more ironic since it’s not a claim public health officials could make today.
Measles and pertussis outbreaks have occurred with increasing regularity and caused a handful of deaths in recent years. Meanwhile, polio, once confined to northern Nigeria, has returned to much of the developing world.
Ferrioli’s warning in the debate over SB 450 coincided with the rapid decline in immunization rates among Oregon school children, whose parents were free to cite their unnamed religious beliefs as reason enough to avoid vaccinations. According to the Oregon Health Authority, non-medical exemption rates were just 1 percent in 2000. Today, Oregon grants exemptions at a higher rate than any other state -- 7 percent.
