Last month The Hollywood Reporter published an illuminating investigation on immunization trends in Los Angeles County, which revealed that vaccination rates on the city’s wealthy west side, in neighborhoods like Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, had plummeted, as incidents of whooping cough surged. The piece had the virtue of offering New Yorkers yet another opportunity to feel smugly superior to their counterparts in L.A., because of course here on the East Coast we like our science to come from scientists, not from former Playboy models and people who feel entitled to pontificate about public health because they drink kefir.

In an interview with NPR last month about her new book, “On Immunity: An Inoculation,” the author Eula Biss presented the idea that vaccinating your children on schedule was now seen as “an extreme position.”

New York State and city have strict immunization requirements, which have been further strengthened over the past two years. It is not possible here, as it is in California, to obtain a philosophically based exemption from those rules for your child. In January, the city health department decreed that all enrolled children from 6 months old through age 5, whether attending public or private schools, had to receive a flu shot before Dec. 31. Parents, though, can recuse their children from vaccination protocols with religious exemptions, which are relatively uncomplicated to obtain.

And certainly some exploitation of that loophole is exercised. Amanda Uhry, who runs a consultancy called Manhattan Private School Advisors, which, as its name suggests, helps parents through the private-school application process, said she recently turned down a half-dozen clients when she discovered that they were opposed to vaccination. For a long while she had never inquired about the issue, but a few years ago, a child she was working with missed his kindergarten interview because of whooping cough, which left her stunned.