CHARLESTON — The West Virginia House of Delegates spent nearly two hours rejecting all but one secondary amendment and a committee amendment to Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s bill making changes to exemptions for the state’s school-age compulsory immunization program.

Senate Bill 460, relating to vaccine requirements, will be on third reading and up for passage Monday. An attempt to suspend the state constitutional rules requiring bills be read on three separate days to allow SB 460 to be passed Friday afternoon failed in a 74-22 vote, requiring four-fifths of members present to vote in favor.

After nearly two-and-a-half hours of debate beginning Friday morning and going into the afternoon, the House voted 51-44 in favor of the strike-and-insert amendment to SB 460 offered by the House Health and Human Resources Committee on Tuesday. But not before voting in favor of a secondary amendment which returned a religious vaccine exemption to the bill.

That committee amendment struck out a religious and philosophical exemption to West Virginia’s compulsory school-age vaccine program that came over from the state Senate in February and was in the bill as introduced on behalf of the governor. State Code requires children attending school 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.

The House Health Committee’s amended bill would allow a licensed physician, physician assistant, or nurse practitioner to submit a written statement to the school administrator or operator of the state-regulated child care center providing a student with a medical exemption for a specific required immunization if that medical professional determines the vaccination could be detrimental to the child’s health or is not appropriate.

Medical professionals would be protected from disciplinary actions by their licensing boards and from civil liability under certain circumstances. They would be required to provide to the state health officer statistics on students with medical exceptions in each county. The bill also prohibits schools and state-regulated child care centers from preventing children with medical immunization exemptions from participating in extracurricular activities or attending school-based events.

There were 10 amendments to the bill listed in the House bill tracking system. One was a competing primary amendment to the committee’s strike-and-insert amendment that was never considered after the committee amendment was adopted. Another secondary amendment was withdrawn after concerns were raised about if the amendment was germane to the bill. Another secondary amendment was withdrawn before being taken up. And six other secondary amendments were rejected.

The one successful secondary amendment – offered by Del. David Green, R-McDowell – keeps in place the updated medical exemption process created by the House Health Committee’s strike-and-insert amendment. However, the Green amendment would allow for a religious exemption, with the parent/guardian submitting a written statement of the exemption to the school administrator or state-regulated child care center.

“This country was founded upon religious freedoms and religious liberty,” Green said. “As a young person, a teenager going to school, I pondered the thought often why our state didn’t allow for religious exemptions. Today, we get to change that.”

Green’s secondary amendment would also allow a private or parochial school to elect to have its own religious exemption policy different from what is being prescribed in State Code. The private/parochial school would inform the West Virginia Department of Education in writing of its policy, which would allow private/parochial to also follow the state mandatory school-age immunization policy if it so wishes.

Debate on the Green amendment went on for more than an hour, with the amendment being adopted in a 52-44 vote with four members absent and/or not voting. Supporters of the amendment said defending religious freedom usurped the public health concerns about weakened public and private school vaccine standards.

“This is a religious freedom bill. We all take an oath to the Constitution. It’s the 1st Amendment for a reason,” said Del. Joe Funkhouser, R-Jefferson. “I believe this amendment cures the constitutional defect within our vaccination statute.”

“There are 250 million Americans who live in jurisdictions that recognize and value their religious liberty,” said Ian Master, R-Berkeley, referring to the 43 states and Washington D.C. that recognize religious exemptions to vaccine mandates. “It’s not some crazy measure or some notion that the sky is going to fall. It would simply be an opportunity for West Virginia to finally recognize the rights of its own people and join more than 250 million Americans who are already afforded this right.”

Opposition to the Green amendment was bipartisan, with members raising concerns that weakening West Virginia’s school-age vaccine requirements would further increase the number of children susceptible to viruses and disease.

“Mountaineers are always free. I realize that is our state motto and individual freedoms are important,” said Del. Bob Fehrenbacher, R-Wood. “However, I also believe that I recognize what I feel is my personal duty, and I believe our collective duty, to protect all persons, including those that have autoimmune disorders or other medical reasons to not be vaccinated. If we relax the exemptions requirements, I believe that our numbers will go down and we will put that part of our population at risk.”

“This is just a blanket exemption,” said Del. Mike Pushkin, D-Kanawha. “Anyone who wants an exemption would be able to get an exemption, then you’d be able to drop well below immunization rates for herd immunity…I think it is good being an outlier and not having measles outbreaks.”

“This is poorly crafted, like virtually everything else that comes out of here,” said House Minority Whip Shawn Fluharty, D-Ohio. “The medical exemption has a mandatory reporting structure to it that makes common sense. But yet for this one, I can write on a piece of toilet paper ‘this goes beyond Johnny’s religious beliefs of my religious beliefs and therefore we want an exemption,’ hand it over to the principal, and that’s that…This is incredibly dangerous.”

Prior to the House floor session, three former state health officers under former governor Jim Justice – Dr. Matt Christiansen, Dr. Ayne Amjad, and Dr. Cathy Slemp – urged in a letter to lawmakers to not pass a bill that would include religious or philosophical vaccine exemptions.

“As physicians and former health officials, we have lived the complexity of the issue,” they wrote. “We’ve stood at the bedside, in schools, and in emergency rooms. We’ve talked to caring parents on all sides. We’ve weighed such heavy policy decisions against outcomes in the real world. We respectfully urge you to not pass SB 460 (or related laws) in any form that would add non-medical exemptions or otherwise weaken the hard-earned protections keeping our children, families, and communities safe.”