Update March 24:
The Senate passed SB 520 unanimously, sending the measure to the House.
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The Senate Health Committee approved a bill that will help increase access to vaccinations by lowering the age of the children that pharmacists can administer shots under normal circumstances from 11 years old to 7 years old.
But the same committee delayed a separate bill that would have granted blanket privilege to dentists after concerns from the Board of Dentistry over whether dentists receive the proper training to give shots and store vaccinations, and to the degree that the board would have to govern the new scope of practice.
Pharmacy students are now trained as part of their current curriculum to give shots, and practicing pharmacists can be trained by a program approved by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. However, they are only trained to give a shot through the deltoid shoulder muscle, and cannot give shots to infants.
Thirty-three states already allow pharmacists to give shots to children younger than 11.
Senate Bill 520, sponsored by Sen. Jeff Kruse, R-Roseburg, would not mean that pharmacists would be the primary provider of childhood vaccinations, since most children are vaccinated before they reach the age of 7. But, they would be available to help kids play catch-up to meet school requirements, and pharmacists could give flu shots to kids in an absence of an outbreak.
Fewer than 2 percent of Oregonians receive their recommended flu shot each year, one of the lowest rates in the country, according to Lis Houchen, the northwest regional director of the National Association of Chain Drug Stores.
In 2013, pharmacists won the right to vaccinate children as young as 3 years old during a disease outbreak. In 2009, Gov. Ted Kulongoski signed a bill lowering the age from 15 to 11 for children that pharmacists could vaccinate under any circumstance.
Both SB 520 and Senate Bill 673 are designed to improve access and counteract the drop in childhood vaccination rates, which have left Oregon vulnerable to preventable, highly contagious diseases.
“Immunization rates in Oregon are not where we would like them to be. Raising these rates is an urgent public health issue, especially in light of recent disease outbreaks,” pharmacist Amy Valdez told lawmakers. “The pharmacy is becoming a more frequent destination to obtain vaccination.”
Electronic records also help pharmacists coordinate vaccine schedules with other providers like never before.
Terrible childhood diseases like measles and pertussis have become increasingly common as more parents reject the overwhelming scientific evidence about the safety of vaccines and refuse to protect their children from these preventable illnesses. The Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics found a clear link between the recent Disneyland measles outbreak and parents who refuse to vaccinate their children.
The anti-vaccine movement has been spurred by the disgraced British researcher Andrew Wakefield, who was found to have fabricated a study that claimed the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine caused autism. The decline in vaccination rates has also been fueled by left-wing conspiracy theorists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has used his family name to get attention to baseless accusations that the Centers for Disease Control is lying about the safety of vaccines.
The United Kingdom stripped Wakefield of his medical license after the British Medical Journal charged that he had made up his results after getting paid by a law firm that planned to sue vaccine manufacturers, a conflict of interest he never disclosed to The Lancet, which published his study, before it was forced to retract it.
The impact on public health has been enormous, with many more people getting sick from preventable diseases, and some dying, including babies who cannot be vaccinated and others with compromised immune systems. Sen. Alan Bates, D-Ashland, an osteopathic physician, testified last month that he believes it’s just a matter of time before someone returns to Oregon from the Third World and causes a polio outbreak.
Valdez told the committee that pharmacists are specially trained to help skeptical parents understand the safety and importance of vaccines, causing Sen. Elizabeth Steiner Hayward, D-Portland, to wonder aloud about whether pharmacists could be more persuasive than doctors and nurse practitioners.
“The latest data on physician counseling shows that no matter what you do it doesn’t seem to help,” said Steiner Hayward, an allopathic family physician.
Steiner Hayward pulled an amendment to another bill earlier this month that would have banned non-medical exemptions for school children, after a backlash from anti-vaccine activists caused some fellow Democrats to cave their support for the bill. That bill, Senate Bill 442, could still pass the Legislature in a less restrictive form.
