AMENDMENT REJECTED — An amendment offered by Senate Minority Leader Mike Woelfel to a bill allowing for religious and philosophical exemptions to school-age vaccines that would have left mandatory requirements for the polio vaccine intact failed in a 12-19 vote Tuesday. -- Photo Courtesy/WV Legislative Photography

CHARLESTON — Bipartisan efforts to amend a bill that will allow parents and guardians religious and conscientious objections to West Virginia’s mandatory immunization schedule for public, private, and religious schools all went down in flames Tuesday.

Members of the West Virginia Senate considered several amendments Tuesday afternoon to Senate Bill 460, relating to vaccine requirements. The bill will be on third reading and up for passage in the Senate today.

SB 460 would allow parents and guardians to object to the requirements of the state’s program for compulsory immunization of public and private school children by citing a religious or philosophical belief. The bill allows children to continue to participate in extracurricular activities and it allows for civil suits against schools that discriminate against these students.

The bill allows the parent or guardian to present a written statement to the administrator of the child’s school or operator of a state-regulated child care center that the mandatory vaccination requirements cannot be met because it conflicts with the religious or philosophical beliefs of the parent, legal guardian, or emancipated child.

State Code requires children attending school in West Virginia to show proof of immunization for diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, varicella, and hepatitis B unless proof of a medical exemption can be shown. West Virginia only provides for a narrow medical exemption to immunizations.

An amendment offered by state Sen. Ryan Weld, R-Brooke, and Senate Minority Leader Mike Woelfel, D-Cabell, would have allowed private, parochial, and church schools to continue to require students to abide by the state required immunization program as long as doing so does not violate that religious entity’s beliefs. The amendment failed 10-21.

“We have an example of what I’m going to call government overreach…which is going to impact the religious freedom of the parents in our state. And that is prohibited, ladies and gentlemen, by multiple sources of law,” Woelfel said. “If you have a law that conflicts with the state Constitution or the federal Constitution and it goes to court and it’s deemed unconstitutional, the Constitution trumps a bill that conflicts with it.”

“This amendment is very simple,” Weld said. “There’s no trick to it. There’s no disingenuous to it. I went to Catholic school for nine years of my life. This allows for a school operated by a church or another religious entity to have a vaccination policy that is in line with the tenets of their faith. That’s it. It’s all it does. It allows them to exercise their religious freedom while operating their school. There’s nothing else to it.”

But Senate Health and Human Resources Committee Chairwoman Laura Wakim Chapman, R-Ohio, argued against the amendment, calling it hypocritical to support the amendment when all private and religious schools have been required for more than a decade to abide by the mandatory immunization program regardless of religious belief.

“Some senators in this very room voted to include private and parochial schools to be mandated – whether they had a religious belief or not – to follow our vaccine laws. But now that we want to protect a child’s religious beliefs, now we have a problem,” Chapman said.

“I think it’s very disingenuous that we have gone through all of these years where the religious preference has been ignored and trampled on, and now all of a sudden they want to flip it around and use that as a defense,’ said state Sen. Rollan Roberts, R-Raleigh, a pastor. “I find offense in that defense.”

Last year, former governor Jim Justice vetoed House Bill 5105, eliminating the vaccine requirements for public virtual schools, private schools and parochial schools. Among other things, HB 5105 would have expanded vaccine exemptions to students attending private or parochial schools in the state, while allowing those schools to set their own vaccination requirements.

According to last year’s roll call vote, Chapman voted for HB 5105, which passed the Senate in a 20-12 vote last year. State Sen. Mike Oliverio, R-Monongalia, asked Chapman what changed between last year and this year to now support allowing religious and parochial schools to set their own standards.

“Help me understand what has changed in the last 12 months,” Oliverio said. “Twelve months ago, you advocated passage of a vaccination bill that gave private schools the ability to decide whether or not they wanted to allow exemptions. Yet this bill appears to me to be the exact opposite of what you advocated for and passed and voted for last year.”

“With all due respect, I did vote for the bill, but I did not advocate for that bill,” Chapman said. “I’ve made statements to several senators that I really did not like that bill. I was not the Health Chair at that time. I would’ve ran a different bill. Again, I’m not even a sponsor on that.”

Woelfel offered another amendment that would have disallowed religious or philosophical objections to the polio vaccine. That amendment failed in a 12-19 vote.

“Some of us are old enough to remember polio, the scourge that it imposed upon our children,” Woelfel said. “I remember kids in braces, kids paralyzed…Polio is a demon. Are we going to stand up and give polio a chance to come back in West Virginia? Polio?”

State Sen. Patrica Rucker, R-Jefferson, argued against Woelfel’s amendment, stating that human fetal cells are used in the production of the polio vaccine. However, according to the Charlotte Lozier Institute – a pro-life advocacy organization – no vaccines are made using fresh aborted fetal tissue, and most polio vaccines use other types of cells, such as monkey cells.

Rucker also cited internet sources claiming that the polio vaccine was leading to greater instances of polio. Vaccines sometimes have a version of the weakened virus in order to help the human body build antibodies. According to a CNN Health article from December, the U.S. uses what is called an inactivated version of the polio vaccine by injection. This inoculation doesn’t always prevent infection, but it does prevent severe versions of polio from attacking the nervous system.

“When you are putting viruses into your body, it depends whether your body can overcome that virus and kill it,” Rucker said. “That’s the intention of a vaccine. But it doesn’t always work. And sometimes it actually can cause you to get the illness.”

Another failed amendment – offered by state Sen. Joey Garcia, D-Marion – would require public, private and parochial schools, as well as all state-regulated child care centers to create reports on immunization exemptions that would be publicly available. These reports would include the number of students who have either a medical, religious, or philosophical exemption, total student enrollment, the percentage of children with vaccine exemptions at each school.

The original version of SB 460 as introduced on behalf of Gov. Patrick Morrisey included similar reporting requirements, but those were stripped from the bill by the Senate Health Committee last Thursday.

“If the governor saw fit, we should follow suit,” Garcia said. “I think it’s a reasonable requirement that will help parents, teachers, and oftentimes grandparents know about the risk assessment that they are facing when they decide whether to send a child to a school or daycare, or whether a teacher should decide to teach at a specific school or daycare.”

But state Sen. Tom Willis, R-Berkeley, argued against Garcia’s amendment, which was also voted down in committee last week. Willis said requiring private and religious schools to track this data would create undue burdens.

“I can tell you they operate on a very thin budget,” Willis said. “That’s why they have spaghetti dinner fundraisers and that sort of thing. A lot of times their staff are paid half of what public school sector staff are paid for education. Every little extra burden we put on them, it’s a tax because somebody has to take the time…There’s a dollar amount per hour to comply with all of these regulations.”