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“Protecting the health and informed consent rights of children since 1982.”

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To view the testimony from the TX public health committee go to: http://www.house.state.tx.us/committees/broadcasts.php?session=78&cmte=410

There was testimony given in the morning and also for about 1 hour in the afternoon session on 7/10/03.

http://www.amarillonet.com/ns-search/stories/071303/new_newimmunization.shtm

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Amarillo Globe-News

New immunization law creates rift

July 13, 2003

By George Schwarz/george.schwarz@amarillonet.com

An attempt to repeal a new law that broadened exemptions for immunizations required for school prompted emotional testimony Thursday in Austin.

The law, which passed as part of a health reorganization measure, added a so-called conscientious, or philosophical, objection to medical and religious grounds for allowing unvaccinated children into schools and day-care centers.

Rep. Jaime Capelo, the Corpus Christi Democrat who chairs the House Public Health Committee, wants to roll back the measure.

He said at Thursday’s committee hearing the measure slipped into the larger bill without proper legislative process.

But Dawn Richardson, president of Parents Requesting Open Vaccine Education, the group pushing the wider exemptions, said Capelo bottled up the bill.

“They’re acting like ‘Oh, this got snuck on,”‘ she said. “We’ve had a bill filed on this three sessions in a row. It still went through the voting process.”

Richardson, who verbally jousted with Capelo during her testimony, said rolling back the philosophical exemption would cause mayhem because there would be a period of time during which the exception would apply before ending again.

The issue is parental rights, not pro or con vaccines, and Texas parents should have the same rights as parents in each of the surrounding states that make it easier for the philosophical exemption, she said.

But data from one of those states illustrate the risk of increasing the population of unvaccinated children, said Dr. David Smith, chancellor of the Texas Tech University System.

Data from Colorado demonstrates that with a higher percentage of the population having philosophical exemptions comes a 22- to 35-fold increase in diseases such as whooping cough.

“It isn’t as simple as everyone would like to think,” said Smith, also a pediatrician and former commissioner of health. “We’re all part of what we now call the herd community.”

Immunizations provide the so-called herd immunity because the more a population has protection from a disease, the less likely the illness would spread, said Dr. Fredrick McCurdy, the new regional chairman of the Pediatrics Department at the Texas Tech Medical School.

But Richardson and others said the medical community skewed the data and accused doctors of ejecting parents from their practices if they don’t agree to immunizations.

One of those was Dr. Clayton Young, who opposed the bill, and said he went through medical school believing that immunization was good.

“We had twins that had vaccine rash associated with their two-, four- and six-month shots, and my wife worked a number of years to convince me that that was the case. Being a board-certified obstetrician and mainline physician, it took a while for me to catch on,” Young said.

But the big scare for him was his 4-year-old’s serious reaction to another vaccine and a subsequent episode when his pediatrician later triggered another episode by giving an immunization, he said.

Smith said patients and physicians need to talk about concerns and safety, and those discussions can’t be legislated.

Reactions to vaccines are rare, said McCurdy, who didn’t speak directly to the legislation.

People may not want to take the one-in-a-million chance for their children to have a reaction from the vaccine, but in making that decision it creates a large pool of children vulnerable to illness, and “if those illnesses take hold in our country again, they are going to start killing kids,” McCurdy said.

Parents who don’t immunize their children are responsible for what happens to their children and others who could be unprotected from a preventable disease, he said.

“I’m not saying that those parents are wrong,” he said. “I’m not saying that we ought to punish people for making that decision, but for every decision that we make in life, and I will make this generalization, there are consequences. And if you’re unwilling to accept the consequences, then don’t make the choice.”

How the Amarillo Independent School District will handle the rules, whatever they are, will depend on the final legislation, said Becky McIlraith, communications director.

“We have, as a society, come to expect certain things - that we can prevent illness and there’s no risk at all to doing that,” McCurdy said. “And there’s no situation in life that has that kind of guarantee.”

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