MONROE — On Tuesday, Oct. 15 the Green County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution asking the state legislature to eliminate the personal conviction waiver to opt out of immunizations required in schools and day care centers.
The resolution passed 18 to 11. Supervisors Gary Neuenschwander and Roger Truttman were absent. Rock County passed a similar resolution on Oct. 10, and Iowa County is scheduled to vote on one Oct. 23, said Green County Public Health Director RoAnn Warden.
Warden said that personal conviction waivers are on the rise across Wisconsin, which the National Conference of State Legislatures website lists as one of 15 states that still allow such an exemption. All states allow exemptions for medical reasons and all but five allow them for religious ones.
In Green County specifically, between the 2017-18 and 2018-19 school years, while medical waivers remained constant at nine and religious waivers decreased from 16 to 13, personal conviction waivers increased from 255 to 290. Numbers for the 2019-20 school year weren’t yet available, Warden said.
At the Oct. 15 meeting, prior to his aye vote, board chairman Arthur Carter asked what the minimum required vaccinations were for entry into school. For kindergarten through fifth grade, those are polio, hepatitis B, DTAP — diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, varicella, aka chicken pox and MMR — measles, mumps and rubella. The only addition for older students is a booster for DTAP later on.
There were 19 public commenters who came to raise their objections to the elimination of the personal conviction waiver.
“The choice to vaccinate must remain between parents and their healthcare provider,” said Bob Carlson, reading a letter from Wisconsin United for Freedom.
Supervisor Paul Beach, one of the no votes, agreed.
“I hate to see the state dictating health measures,” he said Friday.
“You would like to have everybody voluntarily do it,” Carter said of vaccinating, but he added, “I think you’ve got to look at the greater good.”
One way that Warden looks at the greater good is through the concept of herd immunity, which she said “refers to the way we protect a whole community from disease by immunizing the majority of the community.”
“The vaccination protects more than just the vaccinated person,” she said, by stopping the spread of germs, especially to high-risk individuals, like people with diabetes or pregnant women, for example.
That’s relevant to another argument voiced through some public comments at the meeting, specifically those who argued that parents should be able to choose their own immunization schedule for their children.
“Vaccines have been studied extensively and the scheduling is part of what protects our community’s health,” Warden said, increasing herd immunity’s effectiveness.
Supervisor Herb Hanson’s aye vote was informed by his observation of a particular immunization.
“I came up in the era when polio was epidemic in this country and in the world,” he said. “And when the vaccine came out, that changed.”