No more kidding around: restructuring non-medical childhood immunization exemptions to ensure public health protection.

Why we should eliminate personal belief exemptions to vaccine mandates.

We argue that personal belief exemptions to the mandate for childhood immunizations should not be allowed. Parents who choose not to immunize their children put both their own children and other children at risk. Other children are at risk because unimmunized children go to school or day care when they are contagious but asymptomatic, exposing many more children to potentially dangerous infecti...

Compulsory school-entry vaccination laws and exemptions: who is opting out in ontario and why does it matter?

School-entry vaccination regulations are a policy instrument that has been widely used in some jurisdictions as a mechanism to ensure high immunization coverage rates. Exemptions to school-entry vaccination, which can be allowed on medical or non-medical grounds, present a number of ethical and policy challenges. In this paper, we consider the situation in Canada, where school-entry vaccination...

Religious exemptions to childhood immunization statutes: reaching for a more optimal balance between religious freedom and public health.

Vaccine policy and Arkansas childhood immunization exemptions: a multi-year review.

BACKGROUND An increase in total vaccine exemptions (medical, philosophic, and religious) occurred in Arkansas after a 2003 legislation added a philosophic category and used a new process for vaccine exemptions. By legislative requirement, the Arkansas Department of Health monitored exemptions through the 2009-2010 school year. PURPOSE The goal of the study was to determine the prevalence of v...

Factors associated with refusal of childhood vaccines among parents of school-aged children: a case-control study.

BACKGROUND The rate of nonmedical exemptions to school immunization requirements has been increasing, and children with exemptions have contributed to outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases. OBJECTIVES To determine why parents claim nonmedical exemptions and to explore differences in perceptions of vaccines and vaccine information sources between parents of exempt and fully vaccinated chil...