What Does the Latest Anti-Vaccine Failure Mean?

By now, it’s old news that the efforts to get a referendum on the ballot that would overturn the new California vaccine law have failed. The law, SB277, eliminates all non-medical exemptions to school entry vaccine requirements, so that students (without certain IEPs) must be homeschooled if they do not have all of California’s required vaccines.

Opponents to this bill were predictably upset when it passed, and they immediately launched an effort to try to get on this November’s ballot  a measure that would overturn SB277. In order for the anti-SB277 referendum to appear on the ballot, they needed 365,800 people to sign a petition asking for the referendum to be placed in front of voters. According to initial counts, they landed at least 100,000 signatures short.

To put  the petition drive into perspective, California has over 17 million registered voters and a population of 38 million people. As further perspective, a ballot measure that will appear in November in California would restrict how stores use plastic bags. In other words, out of 17 million people, less 2% of registered California voters were motivated to allow unvaccinated children unfettered access to public, private and charters schools. And more were motivated to vote about how the state regulates plastic shopping bags.

You would not have guessed that this would have been the outcome had you followed the legislative hearings surrounding SB277 this spring and early summer. After heated and passionate testimony at committee hearings on both sides, California allows the public to come forward and state their position about the bill to the committee. The lines for those supporting the bill were impressive. It’s not often that people stand publicly and offer their support for a bill.

But the anti-vaccine lines were long. They came to hearing after hearing after hearing, wearing their red shirts, and their lines wound around the building and into the hallways. Their statement of opposition took hours.

In the end, California had a legislative body that was motivated by measles outbreaks sparked in Disneyland and by a science-savvy state senator who knew how to explain vaccines to his colleagues.

And it turns out that the legislators in California were right not to be swayed by the many passionate voices opposing SB277. Because although they were loud, they were a tiny fraction of the voting population in the state–less than 2% of registered voters. And an even smaller percentage of actual California residents.

What does that mean? It would be tempted to declare that it means that we are right and they are losers and we win and they lose so go suck it, Trebek. It is tempting, but it’s wrong. It does not mean that we can be boastful and get our swagger on about a win in California.

It means that there are at least 300,000 people in California who have been scared witless by the lies of the anti-vaccine movement. Their fear makes them very loud, but they are still a tiny minority. It means that now is the time to reach out to them, to befriend them, and to reassure them that they can vaccinate their children and send them to school, and that the risk of something bad happening is very, very, very low.

It means that the death of the referendum efforts are not the end. If we consider it the end, we push the Red Shirts back into their lines and their gated groups and send them back to the echo chambers where they will hear nothing but lies and frightening rumors concerning immunizations. We ask vaccine hesitant parents to wall off their unvaccinated children with other unvaccinated children. And we risk creating new clusters of children who are vulnerable to outbreaks of diseases.

We aren’t done. Don’t pack up your belongings just yet. We have some real work to do.