In the past few years years, a surge in the number of children receiving medical exemptions to vaccine requirements have spurred concerns that families are putting their children and those around them at risk of contracting serious diseases.
Voice of San Diego recently reported that one local doctor has written nearly one-third of all medical exemptions for the entire San Diego Unified School District. That report got the attention of some of the state’s top lawmakers.
Sen. Richard Pan, a pediatrician who wrote the 2015 state law that ended personal belief vaccine exemptions for public schoolchildren, announced earlier this week a new effort to crack down on medical exemptions.
His bill would shift the responsibility for doling out medical vaccine exemptions from individual doctors to the California Department of Public Health. San Diego Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez has signed on as a co-author of the bill.
On this week’s San Diego Explained, Voice of San Diego’s Will Huntsberry and NBC 7’s Catherine Garcia go through the details of how the state would regulate medical exemptions is the bill is approved.
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