Barry R. Bloom is a professor of public health and former dean at the Harvard School of Public Health. Lawrence O. Gostin is the O’Neill professor of global health law at Georgetown University Law Center, where he directs the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. By 1922, the court found that school vaccination laws were squarely “within the police power of a state.”Yet, federal law is virtually silent on childhood vaccinations. All states, appropriately, allow medical exemptions, but 47 states (excluding California, Mississippi and West Virginia) permit religious exemptions, and 17 states allow exemptions for philosophical or “conscience” reasons. Third, for those states that fail to comply, the federal government should condition certain Medicaid or public-health funding on states eliminating nonmedical exemptions.

Source: Washington Post March 08, 2019 00:33 UTC