Senate bill S9351 by Sen Monica Martinez (D-Suffolk County) and Assembly bill A10417a by Assemblymember Jaime Williams (D-Canarsie) would reassert that medical exemptions are to be determined by the child’s physician and that school personnel have no role in making these decisions.
Obtaining a medical exemption in NY is almost impossible. New York has the lowest rate of medical exemptions of any state at 1 in 1000 students, according to the CDC. New York City is even lower at 1 in 2000. Obtaining a medical exemption is so difficult that families are often forced to choose between needlessly endangering their child or losing the child’s right to attend school. Many of these families end up leaving New York.
In the last several years, we have seen a marked increase in the number of children who have had longstanding medical exemptions cancelled by school employees who have no medical training. .
TAKE ACTION
Please use the panel to the right to send a message to your legislators asking him or her to co-sponsor the S9351/A10417a.
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TALKING POINTS
New York Public Health Law Section 2164, Paragraph 8 is explicit:
"If any physician licensed to practice medicine in this state certifies that such immunization may be detrimental to a child's health, the requirements of this section shall be inapplicable until such immunization is found no longer to be detrimental to the child's health."
The law says the decision is up to the child’s doctor. But over the years, the NYC and NYS Departments of Health progressively encroached on the authority of the physicians actually treating children, and allowed school personnel with no medical credentials to routinely override the medical decisions of physicians, thereby allowing school employees to practice medicine without a license, which is a felony in New York.
The Departments of Health bully doctors and schools with threats of investigations and loss of medical licenses into not writing or accepting legitimate medical exemptions.
Schools also frequently reject the attending physician’s opinion and defer to consultant physicians hired by the district.
The child’s physician has a legal and moral obligation to put the best interest of the child first. The school district’s physician has no such obligation, and usually defer to supporting policies to maximize vaccine uptake, and avoid hassles with the Departments of Health, regardless of potential risks to the child in question.
Before the 2019 repeal of the religious exemption in New York, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of families, in New York had the experience of a physician telling them that their child should not receive some or all vaccinations for medical reasons, only to be told by the physician to go get a religious exemption because they were either afraid of retaliation from the Department of Health or afraid that the medical exemption would be denied.
New York's legislators were well-aware of this situation in 2019 when they voted to repeal the religious exemption. We thoroughly documented the problem and spent hundreds of hours explaining the situation to legislators. They knew that thousands of families would be faced with the choice of either pulling their children out of school, many of them with special needs, or subjecting their children to vaccines that their physician, sometimes multiple physicians, had told them could do lasting injury to their child. But they voted for the repeal anyway.
In August of 2019, Governor Cuomo made the situation much worse with new NYS Department of Health regulations that only allow a medical exemption when a child has already had a documented near-death anaphylactic reaction to a previous vaccine. The clear intent of the law was to allow physicians to use their judgment to protect children from potential harm, the regulations now pervert that goal and at best only allow possible protection from a second injury.
Advocates of the repeal of the religious exemption made a great deal of noise about the need to protect immune-compromised people, at the very same time they were making it nearly impossible for immune-compromised children to be protected.
The result is that getting a medical exemption in New York became extremely difficult, and nearly impossible in New York City.
This bill will restore a measure of sanity to New York's insane vaccination policy and puts the health of the child first and stops school personnel from practicing medicine without a license. It does not create a policy based on informed consent, which is the only acceptable policy in any country that claims to be a democracy that respects individual rights, but it is an important step in the right direction and will help get thousands of medically fragile children back in school.