AUGUSTA, Maine — A legislative committee room was standing-room only on Monday as a parade of speakers, including a member of one of America’s most storied political families, made impassioned arguments about Maine’s mandatory vaccination program.
“Anybody who comes here and says that vaccines are safe doesn’t understand the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which has already paid out $3 billion to people injured by vaccines. This is not a risk-free enterprise. It is a risky medical intervention,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy was in Maine to testify before the Legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee and to hawk his book about the alleged dangers of vaccination.
He was one of dozens of people who filled the committee room and overflowed into the hallways of the state office building during a hearing that lasted several hours.
Those opposed to the state’s vaccination regime fell into one of several camps: Those who believe in a widely discredited link between vaccination and brain disorders such as autism; those who decry mandatory vaccination as government intrusion on private health care decisions; and those who believe vaccines’ benefits don’t outweigh the slim but real chance of adverse side effects or reactions.
Several parents said their own children had suffered from debilitating complications that resulted from state-recommended vaccines.
Champions of Maine’s vaccination requirements said vaccines are one of modern medicine’s greatest achievements.
They also argued that vaccines are crucial in protecting the health of not only the people who receive them, but those with suppressed immune systems, such as people suffering from leukemia or who are taking chemotherapy for cancer.
Those people cannot take vaccines and depend on the immunity of their communities to protect them from diseases. When fewer people are vaccinated, their risk increases — a scary scenario given the recent exposure of Kittery shoppers to a person infected with measles.
Measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000 after years of intensive childhood vaccine efforts. But in 2014, the country had its highest number of cases in two decades, which health officials blame in part on parents opting out of vaccination.
“We face the threat of disease and sickness together, because we live in communities,” said Rep. Ralph Tucker, D-Brunswick. “Through broad vaccination, we protect each other, as well as ourselves, as a civic responsibility.”
Lawmakers are considering a bill by Tucker that would end an exemption that allows parents to skip vaccines for their children for “philosophical” reasons. Another bill, by Rep. Linda Sanborn, D-Gorham, would require those seeking a philosophical exemption to prove they had consulted with a doctor who had provided them with information about the risks of opting out.
Without an exemption — which also can be had on medical or religious grounds — kindergarten students in Maine must be vaccinated against eight diseases: pertussis, diphtheria, tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella, polio and chickenpox.
There is overwhelming scientific consensus that vaccines are safe for the vast majority of people and effective at reducing or eliminating deadly disease. While most Maine parents vaccinate their children, federal data shows the percentage choosing to skip vaccines is on the rise.
More than 750 kindergartners started public school in 2013 without receiving all of the required immunizations because their parents opted out, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They accounted for 5.2 percent of all kindergartners in the state, a jump from 3.9 percent in the 2012-13 school year.
Maine’s rate was the fourth-highest in the nation. Only Idaho, Michigan and Oregon reported higher rates of parents shielding their kids from immunization for nonmedical reasons. Maine recorded the largest year-over-year jump of any state in voluntary exemptions.
A study that purported the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine can cause autism — a founding document of the current anti-vaccine movement — has been resoundingly discredited. The British medical journal that originally published the study retracted it, and its author was stripped of his medical license.
Just last month, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study of more than 96,000 children over 11 years, which indicated that the MMR vaccine was not linked with autism, even among children at higher risk for the disorder.
But mistrust about the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry — and a preponderance of readily available but often dubious information — has left many parents skeptical or even hostile toward vaccination.
The Maine Coalition for Vaccine Choices, which opposes mandatory vaccination, testified against Tucker’s and Sanborn’s bills.
Its leader, Ginger Taylor, said the measures intruded on parents’ rights by requiring them to obtain “a permission slip to make decisions about their children.”
“The bills force parents into a conversation with a medical professional that they likely already have had, or may not want to have,” she said. “It puts sincerely held belief up for review to someone whose worldview may be antithetical to their own.”
A separate bill by the coalition, sponsored by Rep. Beth O’Connor, R-Berwick, would create an office within the Department of Health and Human Services to evaluate vaccine injury claims.
Since 1986, pharmaceutical companies have been protected from liability in the relatively minuscule number of cases that vaccines cause negative side effects. The idea is that those companies shouldn’t be punished for occasional and sometimes unpredictable negative reaction to vaccines, given the overwhelming benefit of vaccines to public health.
The same law also created the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a fund for people injured by vaccines, as an alternative to the usual tort system of lawsuits and penalties.
Meryl Nass, a Maine pediatrician, said the immunity complicates the conversation about vaccine safety.
“With the loss of liability, with the increasing cost of vaccines, and with mandates increasing, we’re getting more and more vaccines but less reason for industry to improve vaccines,” she said.
Gov. Paul LePage’s administration opposes all the vaccine-related bills, according to his senior health policy adviser, Holly Lusk. While the governor believes “children should be vaccinated according to best medical practices,” he is not interested in any “additional or redundant” state requirements or rules, she said.
The Health and Human Services committee will consider the three bills in the coming weeks before issuing recommendations to the full Legislature.
BDN Health Editor Jackie Farwell contributed to this report.
Follow Mario Moretto on Twitter at @riocarmine.
