Very cool - WA State vaccinations

From the Bellingham station KGMI:

State Law Makes It Difficult To Opt Out of Vaccinations For Kids
A new law makes it more difficult to keep children from being vaccinated in Washington state.

Starting in July, parents who choose to opt out of immunization requirements in our state, will now need a health care provider to sign a Certificate of Exemption.

Michele Roberts with the Washington State Department of Health says the law, signed by Governor Gregoire this week, requires parents to show they have received information about the benefits and risks of immunizations prior to opting out of school vaccination requirements.

Roberts says vaccines are safe and effective, and the connection between vaccination and autism is nothing more than an urban legend.

Washington has one of the highest immunization exemption rates of any state in the U.S.

More than 6% of children in our schools were exempt from vaccination requirements last school year.

A health care provider does not need to sign the exemption form for parents or guardians who show membership in a church or religious group which does not allow a health care provider to provide medical care to a child.

Good to see some common sense. A large pool of vaccinated children will confer some measure of herd immunity to the non-vaccinated kids but the threshold is right at the 5% to 20% range so WA State's overall 6% is dangerous. The article does not mention but I am suspecting that the 6% rate is not homogeneous and that there are pockets of much larger unvaccinated in the liberal urban as well as the hippie rural areas. The supposed link between the MMR vaccine and Autism is one of the tragic frauds in medical history. It all stemmed from a single Doctor in England who published a paper in The Lancet journal. The publication was revoked, his sample size was only twelve patients and Doctor Wakefield is now just Andy Wakefield -- lost his Medical License. It turns out that Wakefield was in the pay of trial lawyers looking to sue the makers of the MMR vaccine. And yet, useful idiots like Jenny McCarthy still actively promote this false link and cause the next generation of children to be exposed to scourges that should have been wiped off the face of this earth.