Are you talking about CA SB277? It doesn't have any criminal component at all, even for schools and parents that willfully disobey it. It doesn't have any enforcement mechanism. In fact, they gutted the mandatory reporting of individual schools' vaccine rates from the bill because that would cost the state money and force it to go through an extra committee.

I'm saying I'm against this law because its public health impact is very small. As stated before, you'll increase the immunization rate optimistically from 90% to 93% and more realistically from 92% to 93%. For that small of an improvement, it becomes important to ask what the downsides are. Again, if we were going from 0% to 93%, then, by all means, pass the bill. But that's not the situation.

California's kids are already at 90% full immunization. When you already are more or less fireproof, why fireproof more?

If you want to come into the country, get your shots some safe amount of time ahead of traveling. Visas will not be granted unless. Simple. I'm sure there's a similar mechanism for returning citizens as well. I certainly wouldn't immunize at the time of entry, if that's what you're implying, as nice a straw man as that makes.

Again, over 80% of measles outbreaks in the U.S. in recent years originated from outside the United States. With this law, you get a slight increase in coverage (from 91% to 93%) of the other 20%, so optimistically, you're reducing outbreaks by 0.2%. Why bother when there's an huge, gigantic 80% chunk there for the taking?

To explain the 91%, about 3% of kids have a personal belief exemption (PBE). This law only targets them. It disappears the PBE. A PBE could mean a kid has no vaccines, it could mean they have all but one. So, I'm approximating that of the vaccines you'd want kids to have, PBE kids actually have about a third of them. The actual number is probably much higher and could be extracted from the cdph.ca.gov website. And, just for completeness, the other 7% of unvaccinated kids are not addressed by this law at all.

Ah, but there's a subtlety. MMR is given in two rounds. The first confers over 90% effectiveness and the second, well, there's not much room to grow, is there? Under the proposed law, deciding against that second shot because 90% already confers "good health" would exclude you from private and public education (yes, private too).

Many vaccines are given in multiple rounds. They have similar issues.

And, really, do kindergartners need to be vaccinated against STDs? Really? Hep B is in the proposed law. Religion isn't even the principal reason to decide against that one.

Being against this law is not about being against vaccines. You need to look at the incremental benefit of capturing the Personal Belief Exemptions (PBE). It's very small, 2.7% of kids. Contrast that with about 7% conditionally enrolled (that basically means, there's no paperwork, but they get to go to school anyway). In other words, immunization rates will go from 90% to 93% with this law.

The benefit is actually not even that great. You need a PBE even if you're only opting out of one vaccination. So it's more like going from 91.5% to 93%. For that incremental benefit, it's worth asking whether things like what's the rate of kids that will simply not go to school and is this worth our freedom. Obviously, if this law meant going from 0% to 93%, then it's a no-brainer; but that's not what this law is about.

There's a serious flaw here. Those 2.2B doses were not administered to 2.2B distinct individuals. I'd venture to guess it's more like 150M distinct individuals. So, we're looking at about 1 in 100,000 experience an adverse reaction.

While the death rate of measles is about 3 per 1000 (actually I think it's closer to 1, but I'll let it slide), what's the rate of contracting measles under the status quo in the U.S.? Let's take 2014 data as a worst-case, 668 cases. That's about 1 in 500,000. So, the chance of dying from measles in the status quo is about 1 in 150M. That's only for a single year, so multiply by 80 to cover a lifetime, 1 in 2M or so.

So, you're about 20x more likely to get an adverse reaction from a vaccine than die from measles. OK, maybe death is worse than "adverse reaction" on average. All I'm asking is what is the benefit of this specific law? It's not like not passing it means suddenly no one in California ever gets vaccinated.

This specific law does not allow any choice except vaccinate or home school. This law is not restricted to public schools.

So, that Disneyland "outbreak" where no one died...this law would have prevented 2 of the cases. When the benefit is so minimal, religious freedom is a valid concern. If the benefit were all of the cases preventable by vaccines ever, of course, it's a no-brainer. But when the status quo has resulted in 0 deaths in the last 10 years from measles, what exactly is the benefit of a stronger law? The rates of all the other diseases on this law's list have similarly low incidence in California.

So why does this specific law target belief, but not the actual population of unvaccinated children, conditional enrollees?

Mostly it's through the ingredients. Vaccines use pig and cow parts, not to mention aborted fetuses. Many religions are against ingesting these. Some are not anti-vax at all, they just don't want the one that has pig parts.

Wrong. This specific law, SB277, does not restrict itself to public schools. It also affects private schools.

If it's everyone else, as you say, why does this law completely ignore the conditionally enrolled? There are at least twice as many, if not three times, as there are using the Personal Belief Exemption.

Private schools are not exempt from this law.

The problem is this law isn't very effective. Personal belief exemptions (PBE) only comprise 2.7% of children. Another 7% are conditionally enrolled. That basically means they promise to turn in records eventually, but basically never do. That's the other problem with this law: there is no enforcement clause. In fact, to get it past the appropriations committee, they intentionally left it out so that the State itself would not be responsible for enforcement. This leaves the schools themselves to enforce with their already-stretched budgets.

In California, where the law in question was passed, shots are not free. The actual law is not a very effective way to immunize, as it doesn't capture the largest population of unvaccinated schoolkids, the conditionally enrolled. It also does nothing to address the transmission of disease from international travel, which is the source of most vaccine-preventable outbreaks in the United States.

First off, SB277, the law in question, affects private schools too. Only home schooling would allow one to not vaccinate their child.

Second, this specific law has many non-contagious diseases on it. Tetanus is one, diphtheria is another. To me, the most egregious over-reach is Hep B. Why on earth should someone need a vaccination against that for kindergarten? The complete irony is that California has a separate law that protects the rights of kids who actually have Hep B to be publicly schooled. So, an actual carrier is allowed in, but a non-carrier who isn't vaccinated isn't.

This is not the law that OP is talking about. SB277 affects private schools too.