California is already ground zero in the ongoing fight over vaccines, and now an attorney says there are both pro-life and constitutional issues at stake, too.



Tightening an already-restrictive 2015 vaccination law, Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed into law a bill that restricts exemptions for mandatory vaccinations even if there appear to be legitimate reasons.

The state does not allow religious or conscience exemptions yet Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel insists there are legitimate reasons for refusing a shot for chicken pox, rubella, shingles, and more.

"Some of those are made with aborted fetal tissue,” he points out. “And so some people have a sincerely held religious belief not to put anything in their body that actually promotes the destruction of innocent human young children.”

The issue of childhood vaccines is a mine field for politicians since vocal “anti-vaxxers,” and their equally vocal critics, come from both the Right and the Left, often crossing political lines in the debate overscience, health, and individual rights.

Staver

Anti-vaxxers’ critics routinely accuse them of hysteria and of endangering other children, but many anti-vaxxers are parents who say they can trace their child’s sickness, or even permanent disability, back to a doctor’s needle.

There is also the issue of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which exists to "provide financial compensation to individuals who file a petition and are found to have been injured by a VICP-covered vaccine," its website states.

California, meanwhile, ranks No. 46 among the states for child vaccination rates according to an August story by MSN.com that ranked all 50 states.

The newly signed bill comes after California officials saw a 250 percent jump in medical exemptions after the 2015 bill became law, The Huffington Post reported.

The number of school-age children with a medical exemption increased from 0.2 percent during the 2015-2016 school year to 0.7 percent in 2017-2018, the story stated.

Regardless of a person’s motivations, Staver says he personally finds it unconstitutional to force someone to “put something into their body” or else lose the right to attend school or be denied employment.

“That's an unconstitutional violation,” he insists.

The law requires a state inquiry into public schools that have a vaccination rate that dips below 95 percent, and doctors who grant more than five exemptions in a year trigger a review by the California Dept. of Public Health.