Editorial: Nurses shouldn’t have to sign off on vaccination exemptions

Connecticut has a good vaccination rate. More than 98 percent of kindergartners and seventh-graders were vaccinated in the 2017-18 school year — enough, public health officials believe, to ensure “herd immunity” that protects everyone.

But we’ve seen what low vaccination rates can do, most recently in the Pacific Northwest, where dozens of cases of measles have popped up in what’s been described as an anti-vaccination “hot spot.”

Connecticut must work to ensure that unfounded fears of vaccinations don’t cause the same problem here.

That was the backdrop of a public hearing earlier this month on a bill that would make small adjustments to the process for how parents can opt out of vaccinations that children must otherwise, by law, receive before they attend school.

Parents with religious objections to vaccinations can get an exemption by signing a statement, which must then be acknowledged by a judge, lawyer, notary public, town clerk or school nurse, among a few others. The bill would simply remove school nurses from the list of people who can sign off on parents’ statements. It also adds clergy to the list of people who can acknowledge them.

Many parents testified that removing nurses from the list only makes it more difficult to get the religious exemption. Nurses countered that they don’t want to be seen as endorsing a practice they don’t agree with.

The backdrop to the bill raises significant legal issues, but in the end, the bill is a good one. Nurses shouldn’t be required to sign off on — or even simply acknowledge — a practice they disagree with. Parents can easily go to town hall and get a signature, and the addition of clergy to the list makes sense for someone claiming a religious exemption.

But the overarching issue is not about who can sign off. It really revolves around the definition of religious freedom and what behavior it permits.

There is a distinction between religious belief and religious practice. The courts have carved out narrow exemptions to laws to permit behaviors predicated on religious belief, but even the Supreme Court has been inconsistent on the issue. The court has ruled that religious motivation is not a justification for disobeying laws that are “generally applicable” to everyone.

At the extremes, the reasoning is clear. Human sacrifice, obviously, cannot be protected by the Constitution, even if someone were to claim it were part of a religious ceremony.

Similarly, yelling “fire” in a crowded theater is not protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. And laws restricting access to firearms, the courts have ruled, do not infringe on Second Amendment rights.

While the Constitution guarantees certain rights, those rights are routinely and reasonably constrained for the sake of public health and safety.

Vaccinating children is clearly such a public health issue. Deadly diseases like measles cannot be allowed to return to society based on flawed and debunked science and runaway quasi-theories promulgated on social media. There should be a high bar for granting religious exemptions to vaccination rules. The bill in question doesn’t significantly raise that bar, despite public testimony claiming it does. It simply relieves school nurses of a role in approving the exemption that they don’t want.

Still, the legislature should consider whether the bar for claiming a religious exemption is high enough. All someone has to do is sign a form and get it witnessed. Should people claiming the exemption first be required to show that they understand that vaccines are safe and effective?

The number of children whose parents have taken advantage of the religious exemption is up to 1,255 state-wide. In 2008, there were 466 such children. While some say that number is still too low to be a concern, the increase is worrying.

There are students with compromised immune systems in Connecticut schools who legitimately cannot receive vaccinations. Especially for their protection, all other students must be vaccinated.

Sincere religious beliefs are of course a right. But that right doesn’t give anyone the freedom to endanger others’ lives.