Is Vaccination Policy Fair?
One of the issues that’s likely to concern our state legislators during the upcoming session is the question of school vaccinations. West Virginia has long promoted a policy whereby all students have to be vaccinated for childhood diseases to enroll. Exceptions are made only for documented medical reasons.
West Virginia has not been known overall as a healthy state, something that could be attributed more to poverty, food insecurity and tainted water, The Annie E. Casey Data Book for 2024 rated kids’ well-being overall and put ours in 44th place out of the 5o states. Not great obviously, But in regard to health only, the same report ranked these same West Virginia kids at 35th out of 50. Better, obviously.
So the question is, for what reasons is health specifically so much better than overall well-being? Could it have something to do with the fact that our kids are better vaccinated than children in the deep South states, those that are near and at the bottom. Would our kids be down closer to the statistical bottom too, if we didn’t have a near universal vaccination policy?
I can’t know because the data don’t discriminate at that level. But I’m going to say, yeah, probably that is at least one of the reasons; vaccinated kids are healthier. Is the school vaccination requirement giving us some assurance that the youngest of us prop up our well-being statistics so they don’t go from bad to horrific.
The more important issue for right now is that our Republican governor, Patrick Morrisey, last year issued an executive order declaring that the state should do away with this universal vaccination requirement. Of course, he doesn’t cite particulars of why our poor kids are healthier than the equally poor kids of Louisiana and Mississippi, and he also doesn’t seem interested in speculating about it either.
Instead, he bases his reasoning on the argument that vaccination without an exception for religious objections is not fair to believers. In other words his desire to be fair to them overrules his desire to keep kids from getting sick from diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, rubella, chickenpox, mumps, rubella, polio, and hepatitis B.
There were, for instance, measles cases in all five of our neighboring states in 2025. There was as well one case in West Virginia, but the infected individual was not vaccinated and was returning from an international visit. The Monongalia County health department, where the infected person lived, put out an advisory to self quarantine if exposed, but no further cases were reported. Could that have been because of our vaccination policy?
So back to the issue of fairness or, rather, the question of the greater good. Is it fair for vaccine deniers to risk infecting other people because they don’t want to vaccine their own kids? What’s interesting is that when a bill was proposed in the 2025 Senate, there was no consensus even among the Republican supermajority in the Senate, although the measure did pass. Later when the bill was passed to the House, it met the same resistance among Republican members, but this time it failed to pass. There’s some thought about whether the legislature will or will not take up the issue in the current 2026 session because the governor’s executive order is now being litigated in the WV Supreme Court.
So how did our local legislators vote on the proposed amendment (Senate Bill 460), our local Senators, Barrett and Rucker both voted in favor of the bill. In the House all four of our local delegates, Anders, W. Clark, Funkhouser, and Ridenour, likewise voted in favor of the bill.
I’d like to know from all six of our local legislators why their own sense of fairness skews so much to the religious right and vaccine deniers. Do none of them see things from the perspective of all their many constituents who see weakening the policy as a danger to the community? And if so, why not? Could it be because Republicans at the national level, including importantly the Secretary of Health and Human Services himself a vaccine denier, oppose vaccinations? Are our local legislators listening to their constituents?
Check out West Virginia Watch’s article for additional background information on vaccination policy in the state and where it might be headed in the 2026 legislative session.
