Editorial: Science, at last, gets its say on vaccines

With the no-nonsense dispatch of a good family doctor, Gov. Jerry Brown overlooked the kicking and screaming of vaccine resisters and tightened California’s lax school immunization laws.

“The science is clear,” Brown explained, accurately, in a signing statement June 30. “Vaccines dramatically protect children against a number of infectious and dangerous diseases.”

Never has such an obvious point sounded so refreshing. For months, the noise around Senate Bill 277 has obscured the glaring need to get vaccination rates back to a more secure threshold.

Now, with the bill’s passage, parents who want their kids to attend school or day care with other children will have to vaccinate them against communicable childhood diseases or get a licensed physician to give them a medical waiver. There will be no more religious opt-outs, no personal-belief exemptions.

Though that may sound dramatic, it isn’t. The new law is more flexible than its opponents pretend, allowing unimmunized kids to stay in school until their next vaccine checkpoint, for example, and letting hard-core resisters home-school together. And most families already consider immunization a given — something responsible people just do to prevent the spread of lethal scourges like whooping cough, diphtheria, rubella, measles and polio.

So for most Californians, this law will change nothing.

But, abetted by the state chiropractic lobby, opponents have tarred the law’s backers as fascists, racists, tools of Big Pharma and child abusers. They have stalked lobbyists and threatened state lawmakers. Even as Brown read the bill, white-clad protesters stood vigil outside the Capitol, singing the anti-authoritarian anthem from the fictional “Hunger Games” movies.

Now there is talk of lawsuits, and we expect a new bill will arise next year to weaken this one. We urge health-conscious lawmakers to stand firm in support of the new law.

This story was originally published July 1, 2015 at 3:10 AM with the headline "Editorial: Science, at last, gets its say on vaccines."