By Doug Curlee | Editor at Large
When Gov. Jerry Brown signed the strict new vaccination policy into law last month, it did not end the efforts of anti-vaccination parents and activists to block or repeal that law.
The law ended virtually all previous exemptions except for the medical ones. It did away with personal and religious provisions that allowed parents to send their unimmunized children to public schools in California.
There are now two separate efforts afoot to either block the law in court, or to force the measure onto the ballot in the form of a referendum to repeal the law.
(Courtesy Flickr user dm-set via Creative Commons)
If the parents who were with their children at Allied Gardens Rec Center and park are any indication, neither of those alternatives will find much support among the general public.
Jim and Lisa Fritz, along with their son Sean, who has all his immunizations, are all in favor of the new law.
“It’s for the greater good, and I’m fine with it” Jim said. “There are places people can send their kids to school if they don’t want them vaccinated,” he said, referring to the private school or homeschooling alternatives available to people.
Lisa and Sean agreed.
“I don’t want to get sick because someone didn’t get vaccinated,” Sean said
Stacy Irie was very happy to see that bill signed into law. She doesn’t think either challenge to the law has much chance of succeeding.
“I support the new law, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t,” Irie said.
One of the possible routes of challenge is to go to court and claim that children who have not been vaccinated will be deprived of their right to a public education if they are not allowed to attend the public schools.
Michelle Roth, attorney and mother of an infant, doesn’t think that one has that great a chance.
“They might get it to a court, but this law is really for the greater public good,” she said, noting that was not a legal opinion but just the opinion of a mother whose children will go to school.
The other avenue vaccination opponents will try is to force a referendum in the ballot to repeal that law. That effort is being spearheaded by former assemblymember and gubernatorial candidate Tim Donnelly, who is now an archconservative radio talk show host. He has already filed and paid the fee to the California Secretary of State to begin gathering signatures for the effort. Once it’s certified for the ballot, there will be a 180-day window within which 365,880 valid signatures will have to be gathered and verified. That will mean that close to a half a million signatures will need to be gathered in order to be sure to overcome all the likely duplicates, illegal and just plain phony names on the petitions. Election officials say that is a very heavy load to carry.
“I’m all for it,” said new mom Jerica Alonzo. “I’ll make sure my little girl has all the vaccinations she needs. It’s really important.”
There was one young woman who’d heard what I was asking, and she caught up with me as I was leaving. She refused to give her name, saying she didn’t want people to know who she is.
“I’m upset about it, because I think it should be my decision about my children’s health,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do, but private schools might be more than we can afford.”
That’s a factor that some parents are going to have to consider very carefully in the future.
—Doug Curlee can be reached at doug@sdcnn.com.
