Four years into a crackdown on high numbers of California students going unvaccinated because of claimed concerns over vaccine risks, new statistics from the 2018-2019 school year show that 10 percent or more of the students in 117 kindergartens and 5 percent or more of those at 1,500 other kindergartens do not have their required shots. But these students are able to attend school because their parents have succeeded in obtaining medical exemptions.

After a new law by Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, was enacted in 2015 that ended personal belief exemptions from vaccinations, the number of vaccinated kindergartners increased to above 95 percent on average. That’s the level seen as creating “herd immunity” from infectious diseases. This was treated as a success story by public health officials who supported Pan’s effort to respond to a Disneyland-based measles outbreak that was California’s worst in years. They expected the vaccination rate to keep going up as public health information campaigns emphasized their importance.

But the overall kindergarten vaccination rate in the state dipped to 94.8 percent in 2018-19, and to much lower at many schools. Aware of the sharp increase in medical exemptions on questionable grounds, this led Pan and Gov. Gavin Newsom to hash out a compromise under which state public health officials would automatically review such exemptions in two circumstances: when doctors issued five or more in a school year and in schools with vaccination rates less than 95 percent.

Senate Bill 276 has passed initial votes and is expected to be enacted by session’s end in September. But authorities in the Bay Area have already begun a crackdown after a San Jose Mercury-News report found that just five doctors issued at least one-third of all vaccine exemptions in eight of the region’s school districts.

Doctors responding to parents’ ‘market demand’

Experts say that these doctors are in effect responding to “market demand.” Thousands of parents – often affluent people who are skeptical about modern medicine and interested in alternative medicine – remain eager believers in discredited theories that vaccines are responsible for autism and other early childhood medical woes. They reject the representations of public health authorities.

Meanwhile, as CalWatchdog recently reported, California is one of the states most at risk of a measles outbreak caused by the combination of both unvaccinated children and the high level of air passengers from nations around the world such as the Philippines and Italy that have had measles epidemics because vaccination rates have dropped.

Public health officials believe it is just a matter of time until California has a measles outbreak as severe as the one based in Disneyland in the winter of 2014-15, in which at least 131 infections were reported.

UCLA warns many exposed to virus at food court

“In 2019, four outbreaks linked to patients with international travel have been reported in California,” the state Department of Public Health announced last week. As of July 10, the state had 58 confirmed measles cases and the U.S. had 1,109 measles cases. The national number is nearly triple the total seen in all of 2018.

This week, officials at UCLA are on edge after confirming that an individual who used the UCLA campus food court on July 2 and July 3 was infected with measles and potentially could have exposed thousands of people. The university says employees who may have been exposed cannot return to work until they prove they’ve been vaccinated.

Measles is one of the most highly infectious viral diseases, public health officials say. Before an effective vaccine became available in 1963, it killed millions of people worldwide each year. That fell to about 110,000 a year earlier this century after vaccines became widely available even in poor nations. 

But the World Health Organization said in April that the number of deaths appears to be steadily increasing worldwide since 2017, the last year for which full statistics were available.

“Brown wants to combine three state-funded early education programs, strip their requirements and let each local school district decide how to best spend the money,” Capital Public Radio reported. “But there’s a catch: districts must prioritize low-income and at-risk four-year-olds.”

Michael Cohen, Brown’s finance director, told CPR that negotiations over the details will happen at the right time. “It’s important to set up the structure and get consensus on what the program will look like,” he said. “And then at that point, it will become an annual budget decision about what amount of funding makes sense.”

Continued conflict

The disagreement deepens a conflict that intensified among California Democrats late last year. In October, Brown gave his left wing fits when he shot down a big preschool bill that had even drawn support from some Sacramento Republicans. “The Preschool for All Act (AB47), authored by Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, passed with bipartisan support, but failed to get backing from Brown,” as EdSource reported at the time. “The bill would have set a deadline of June 30, 2018 for granting all low-income 4-year-olds access to transitional kindergarten or state preschool. It was meant to firm up a promise made in last year’s legislation (SB837) that set the eventual goal of providing pre-kindergarten schooling for all low-income 4-year-olds. Because of that previous commitment, Brown said in his veto message that the bill was unnecessary and that future preschool funding should be addressed in the budget-setting process.”

Contrary to Brown’s wishes, the bill merely presumed that future funding would materialize in the years to come. To his irritation, estimates of its total cost “varied greatly, ranging between $147 million and $240 million, depending on how many children are placed in full-day vs. half-day programs,” as EdSource added.

A two-front battle

But Brown’s adversaries got their revenge when he released his latest budget. As the Washington Post reported, Chris Hoene, executive director of the California Budget & Policy Center called the budget a “missed opportunity to use the state’s strong revenues to boost key public investments that help individuals and families advance, such as child care and preschool, welfare-to-work services, affordable housing, and higher education.” At the same time, the Post noted, the California branch of the Children’s Defense Fund said Brown was “using the threat of future recession to justify not making critical investments of our most vulnerable children today.”

The governor’s block grant proposal, which would allocate over a billion and a half dollars to early learning, aggrieved activists who have demanded that the state use its recent surpluses to restore education spending to pre-Great Recession levels. “During the recession the state cut early education by over $1 billion, which amounted to almost 100,000 lost preschool seats. In recent budget years some of those cuts have been restored, but spending on early care is nowhere near 2008 levels when the budget was about $3.2 billion,” as Southern California Public Radio noted.

Meanwhile, however, Brown also incurred the wrath of education reformers, including some fellow Democrats, who have grown increasingly frustrated with the inability of the state’s teachers unions to deliver a satisfactory level of education to all students enrolled in public schools. “As Democrats pull back from holding educators accountable for results, they risk alienating old allies as well,” UC Berkeley education professor Bruce Fuller wrote in the Sacramento Bee. “California parents lost a tool this month when Gov. Jerry Brown trashed a well-known achievement index, pleasing union chiefs while infuriating civil rights advocates who can no longer pinpoint listless campuses.”