New York State, facing a severe measles outbreak and a growing anti-vaccine movement, voted Thursday to end religious exemptions parents could invoke so far to bypass school vaccination requirements.
After a heated debate, both houses of Parliament – which sits in Albany, the state’s capital – voted overwhelmingly for this measure.
Governor Andrew Cuomo having planned to ratify the text in the process, New York will join a handful of American states, including California, having removed religious exemptions.
New York has been facing a resurgence of measles since the fall in two regions: in New York itself, in parts of Brooklyn with a large Orthodox Jewish population, where 588 cases have been recorded since October. And in Rockland County, in the New York City suburbs, which is also home to a large Orthodox population, where 266 cases have been identified.
The disease, which is extremely contagious and with potentially fatal complications, arrived with travelers from Israel.
Emergency measures have been introduced, in particular forcing schools to exclude unimmunized children except for medical reasons, without succeeding in extinguishing the epidemic.
For several weeks, public health experts have been calling for the abolition of religious exemptions, worried about the growing number of anti-vaccine parents, accused of invoking religious exemptions as a pretext for not having their children vaccinated.
Several dozen elected officials voted against the text, arguing in particular that the removal of religious exemptions violated the First Amendment of the American Constitution, which protects religious freedom.
“I believe that (the text) goes too far and that it encroaches too much on religious freedoms,” said Republican Andrew Lanza.
“One of the things that really sets our country apart and makes it great is the First Amendment,” he said. “It is not because we ask for a religious exemption that we obtain it automatically,” he added, arguing that the authorities had only to reject any request considered unjustified.
But supporters of the removal of the exemption felt that strong action was needed in the face of the worst measles outbreak in the United States since 1992, with 1,022 cases recorded this year, in 28 American states.
“The point is, we have an anti-vaccine movement and we need to respond to it with the correct information,” Democratic Senator Shelley Mayer said.
“In the meantime, we have a public health crisis (…) The time has come to make a difficult decision and to protect the next generation from the danger of childhood illnesses,” she said.
Measles is on the rise all over the world. There have been no deaths so far in the United States, but the country, which officially eradicated the disease in 2000, could lose that status if the epidemic continues beyond the summer.
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