HOUSTON CHRONICLE
At first you don’t worry. After all, every kid gets a fever. Only a pediatrician of a certain age would even know to look in the back of your baby’s mouth for the classic white spots.
Then the miserable malady becomes all too obvious.
Three to five days after being infected with measles, an angry rash of red spots covers your child — face, shoulders, chest, back, legs — while their temperature spikes to 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Mercifully, most kids recover from measles. If unvaccinated, though, one in five is hospitalized and one in a thousand gets brain inflammation and convulsions so violent to bring about permanent deafness or intellectual disability.
Until the 1960s, when a measles vaccine became widely available and part of the routine for children before enrolling in public school, measles raged through classrooms and families. It spread with astonishing ease to 9 out of 10 people in the vicinity of an infected person.
For decades, though, Americans haven’t had to worry. In 2000, measles was declared eradicated here but today, outbreaks are occurring among pockets of unvaccinated people. It happened in Texas in 2013, at Disney World in 2014 and in central Ohio just last month, where an outbreak sent 36 children to the hospital.
While the overall vaccination rates for students remain relatively high in Texas, the number of parents seeking non-medical exemptions for religious and philosophical reasons has skyrocketed. In 2003-2004 school year, 2,314 non-medical exemptions were recorded. In the past school year, it was 85,726.
It’s no time for any state to be weakening vaccination policies. So why are some Texas lawmakers trying to exactly that?
At least 27 bills have been filed that would in some way limit the ability of governments or private employers to require vaccinations or masks, with many focusing on COVID. Some of the bills focus on how the state decides which vaccines to require for enrollment in public schools. Senate Bill 1024, introduced by Sen. Lois Kolkhorst (R-Brenham), would take authority away from the Texas Department of State Health Services to set the vaccine list and give that power to the Texas Legislature.
Yes, you heard that right. Take the authority away from the health department and give it to politicians who decisions, shall we say, are often influenced by more than a duty to protect public health.
The bill will be discussed today before the Health and Human Services committee that Kolkhorst chairs. Her office did not respond to our requests for comment.
A similar bill, Senate Bill 1177, was introduced by Sen. Bob Hall (R-Rockwall). The vaccine list in Hall’s bill includes diphtheria, mumps, poliomyelitis, rubella, measles, and tetanus, but not others on the current DSHS list, including hepatitis A and B, chickenpox or meningococcus.
When the editorial board requested to speak with Hall about why he included some vaccines but not others, his staff responded by email: “The list in SB 1177 strips the vaccines that were not legislatively added to the immunization schedule. It is expected that most of the current required list will be reinstated on the list before final passage, but the reasoning was that the Legislature, not a state agency, needs to be making these decisions. The impetus for the legislation was the CDC push to add COVID vaccines to the immunization schedule and DSHS’s history of strict adherence to CDC policy.”
Again, we’re not sure what makes a bunch of lawyers, bankers, real estate brokers and business people — Hall’s background is aerospace engineering — more knowledgeable than actual health experts about what’s best for Texas kids. Parents may consider special circumstances in vaccine decisions but most rely on the state’s immunization schedule to guide them.
What happens if that schedule is guided by politics?
Newer vaccines that have gone through years of development and trials could not be added in the future unless lawmakers pass a new bill. That process, especially in a state where the Legislature meets only every two years, is not up to the task of reviewing new discoveries or responding to fast-moving threats. At the very start of the COVID vaccine rollout in 2020, many Americans had fears about the apparent speed with which vaccines were developed and approved. Those fears, certainly understandable at that moment, shouldn’t hamstring Texas’ vaccine guidance for all eternity.
“You don’t want things set in stone,” Dr. Michelle Ludwig told us.
Incidentally, she spoke to the editorial board over the phone using software that transcribed our voices into text she could read. As a child, she experienced hearing loss as a result of meningitis and, as a physician at Baylor College of Medicine, she treats patients with cervical cancer. She described the harrowing treatments her patients undergo for a disease that can be prevented in many cases with a simple HPV vaccine, which first gained approval in 2006.
Put yourself not just in the shoes of her patients, but of many of their parents who must watch helplessly as their daughters suffer through the consequences of their decision not to vaccinate them against HPV. Still others may not have known about the option or didn’t have access to the vaccine.
Texas should be strengthening access to vaccines and empowering state agencies to improve health while making sure parents exercising their rights to obtain non-medical waivers are fully informed and educated. For example, before obtaining a waiver for the measles vaccine, parents should understand they are putting their child at risk of profound hearing loss and intellectual disability. Sure, the chances of such a fate are still low in this country, but with every waived vaccine, they become less so.
The process for adding new vaccines to the state’s standard list should be led by experts and then acted upon by a state health department that already has the oversight of commissioners appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott.
The next measles outbreak could be among one of the many undervaccinated communities in Texas, some of which are in liberal enclaves in Austin where low vaccine rates mirror those in conservative ones outside Dallas-Fort Worth. If that happens, parents and doctors today won’t know what’s hitting them because most haven’t experienced a major outbreak in generations. Let’s save ourselves the trouble of relearning, and urge our lawmakers to vote against these proposals, to prevent the heartache of mass hospitalizations, disability and death.