This year, dozens of states across the country reported measles cases, a disease that the Centers for Disease Control declared eliminated in 2000.
Now it’s back in some of Wisconsin’s neighboring states, including Illinois, Iowa and Michigan.
But that doesn’t really worry Kari Pagel, an Oconto Falls public school speech therapist and mom of three elementary school-aged kids. Pagel drove two and a half hours to Madison on July 26 to attend a state Department of Health Services public hearing on rule changes to Wisconsin’s immunization standards.
Experts say vaccines don’t cause autism or other neurological disorders, but Pagel remains unconvinced. She tells Isthmus that she’s seen an uptick in the frequency and severity of atypical neurological development in the kids she works with, and she thinks vaccines are, at least in part, to blame.
She says she’s found a community of like-minded folks over the past decade who reinforced her theory — enough so that she decided to delay getting certain vaccinations for her kids. She and her husband have decided not to vaccinate their youngest at all.
“Those reports [of measles outbreaks] scare me less and less and less because the power lies within our family, my husband and I making decisions,” Pagel says. “That doesn’t mean we don’t seek medical care if we need it, that’s not the case. But we also feel empowered to take care of our kids.”
Pagel uses a religious exemption to keep her kids in public school without up-to-date vaccinations. But there’s another option that Pagel says is popular with other parents who don’t want to vaccinate — the personal convictions waiver. Like the religious waiver, it’s a box parents can check to enroll their kids in school without the required shots.
For the second time this session, state Rep. Gordon Hintz (D-Oshkosh) introduced a bill that would have eliminated that option.
“We introduced it after meeting with public health experts on what’s the best thing that we could do if we wanted to reverse the trend of people not getting vaccinated,” says Hintz, the Democratic minority leader. “Hopefully it starts the discussion, but I think sometimes you need to have an outbreak and I would prefer that we don’t have that. My goal overall is to keep people as healthy as possible and to avoid diseases that are completely preventable.”
But now, says Hintz, the bill is likely dead in the water. At least for this session.
Republican Speaker Robin Vos referred the bill to the Committee on Constitution and Ethics, where it wasn’t given a public hearing. Vos’ office didn’t return a request for comment.
Republican Chuck Wichgers (R-Muskego), chair of the panel, says he doesn’t think the bill has enough support among lawmakers. “I don’t think anyone at the Capitol is against vaccines,” Wichgers says. “But I think people have a lot of questions about why we would put a bill forward that would limit the rights of parents on when, where, why and how to give their children medicine.”
Malia Jones, a scientist who researches vaccine refusal at UW-Madison, says vaccinating kids before school is imperative to preventing the spread of disease. She says that eliminating the personal convictions waiver would help prevent outbreaks in Wisconsin.
“Several states have made changes to their policy requiring vaccines in order to send children to school,” Jones says. “What we’ve seen when other states have changed their policies is that eliminating the personal conviction waiver, or just making more difficult to get, does reduce the number of exempted students in the state.”
The recently signed state budget allocates $100,000 for vaccine education. Stephanie Schauer, immunization program director at the state Department of Health Services, says officials haven’t decided exactly how they’ll spend the money yet.
The department did a spring media campaign about the importance of vaccines that included social media outreach, radio spots and videos. Schauer says she’s seen increased attention from parents on vaccines, especially after media reports of measles outbreaks in other states.
“People feel very passionately about immunizations on both sides of the issue,” Schauer says.
But Schauer notes that vaccination rates in Wisconsin were up last year, which she thinks is due both to the outreach campaigns and growing media attention.
The proposed immunization changes that got a public hearing last week would make several tweaks to the state’s vaccine requirements for kids in school. These include requiring the meningococcal vaccine, which protects against meningitis, for students entering seventh grade and redefining the term “outbreak” to be more consistent with CDC definitions.
This would be the first time since 1981 that DHS has updated its immunization rules for children in and entering school.
Immunization rates vary greatly throughout the state, Jones says, with different populations being influenced by both religious beliefs and access to medical care.
In Madison, the vast majority of kids in public schools are immunized, says Sally Zirbel-Donisch, health services coordinator for the Madison school district. Vaccination rates in the district are on the rise, she adds.
During the 2018-19 school year, the parents of 737 of roughly 27,000 students used the personal convictions waiver, Zirbel-Donisch says. That’s 2.6 percent of students, down from 3.2 percent in the 2013-14 school year.
“[Measles] can become an epidemic really quickly,” Zirbel-Donisch says. “We just want to make sure all our children are safe.”
