Health officer urges Clark County parents to vaccinate school children

At 15 Clark County public elementary schools last year, 10 percent or more of kindergartners began school exempt from receiving disease-preventing vaccinations.

And that’s got the Clark County health officer, Dr. Alan Melnick, worried.

“That scares me that we can have a really horrible situation develop,” said Melnick, director of Clark County Public Health.

As Clark County’s students prepare to head back to school this month, Clark County Public Health is pushing parents to vaccinate their children. And exemptions — specifically the broad-ranging category of personal exemptions — can be one of the biggest roadblocks.

When families enroll their children in kindergarten, they’re legally required to provide either proof of vaccination, a planned schedule of vaccines or proof of exemption, including medical or religious exemptions. But in Washington, parents can also exempt their children from receiving vaccinations for almost any personal or philosophical reason, so long as a health care professional discusses the risks of doing so and signs off on the parent’s decision. Students who are not vaccinated may be withheld from school in case of a disease outbreak.

Medical science has debunked the prevailing myths about vaccines, such as the idea that they cause autism or that an infant’s immune system can’t process multiple vaccines. Still, Clark County’s vaccination rate tends to trend behind Washington’s, with more families choosing to exempt their children here than in the state as a whole, according to Department of Health data from the 2017-2018 school year.

“I don’t understand why people listen to this nonsense, and it is completely junk nonsense,” Melnick said.

For all students, kindergarten through senior year of high school, 4.9 percent of students in Washington were exempt from vaccines last year, and 3.7 percent fell under that personal or philosophical category. In Clark County, those numbers are higher: 7.5 percent of Clark County students had vaccine exemptions, with 5.9 percent registered as having personal exemptions.

For the county’s youngest students, those numbers trend higher still. In Clark County, 7.9 percent of kindergartners did not receive all their vaccines due to exemptions, and 6.3 percent had personal exemptions. Statewide last year, 4.7 percent of incoming kindergartners were vaccine exempt, and 3.7 percent had personal exemptions.

The number of students receiving exemptions varies greatly by school. Eleanor Roosevelt Elementary School in Vancouver Public Schools, for example, had no kindergartners last year with exemptions. At Battle Ground Public Schools’ River Homelink, which for kindergartners blends classroom time with home learning, the exemption rate was 42.6 percent, and 38.9 percent of students had personal exemptions.

Those double-digit exemptions can be scary, Melnick said, especially for highly contagious diseases with deadly complications like measles or rubella.

“All these diseases are exquisitely contagious,” Melnick said.

For every case of measles, Melnick said, another 12 or 18 people can become infected, and one or two people per thousand are expected to die of the disease. Rubella may be asymptomatic or show few symptoms for children, but if women contract the disease in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, they may see severe birth complications or miscarry, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There are valid medical reasons a child may not be able to receive vaccines, Melnick said. Certain types of childhood immune deficiencies or childhood cancers can make it dangerous for students to receive vaccinations.

But, Melnick notes, those same students who are medically unable to receive vaccines can be at higher danger from the very diseases those vaccines are meant to prevent in a population with high exemption rates. That’s why community immunity, or herd immunity, is so important. Depending on the disease, between 83 and 95 percent of people need to be immunized to create a population where the disease is unlikely to spread.

“The point I’m trying to make is the only way to prevent exposure is to not be susceptible to these diseases in the first place,” Melnick said.

The bottom line, Melnick said, is parents should immunize their children.

“There’s a ton of misinformation out there,” he said. “Vaccines are incredibly safe. The complication rate is one in a million or less. It’s one of the best things we’ve done in medicine.”